KERALA RISING · FROM EXPORTING PEOPLE TO EXPORTING IDEAS WORKED EXAMPLE: REWARDING THE LIVING ASSET, NOT THE PHOTO-OP A conventional scheme pays a subsidy when a recharge pit is built and never looks again; survival is nobody’s job, so a meaningful share of assets silently fail. The engine inverts this. A new pit earns provisional points; enough to motivate the build, but the full points land only when a dry-season follow-up image confirms the pit is still there and still working. The household now has a standing reason to maintain the asset, the panchayat’s water-security index reflects functioning assets rather than built ones, and the open-data well levels can be checked against the count. Persistence, the thing that actually refills an aquifer, is the thing that is rewarded. The partner institution The Ground Water Department, the Haritha Keralam Mission, and local panchayats own the outcome; Kudumbashree groups are the natural execution backbone, as they are for cleanliness. The program supplies the audited, persistence-checked asset register these bodies need for their own reporting and their central-scheme claims, enhancing their mandate rather than competing with it. 143