KERALA RISING · FROM EXPORTING PEOPLE TO EXPORTING IDEAS What gets measured, and what it helps to – Count and persistence of verified conservation assets per panchayat; functioning assets, not built ones. – Dry-season well-level and pond-level data published as open data and cross-checked against the asset count. – Participation rate among households and institutions in the panchayat. THE ADJACENT BENEFIT Reliable summer water raises agricultural resilience and property value, cuts tanker dependence, and gives the panchayat audited evidence for central water-mission funding, turning a private virtue into a budget line the local body can actually claim against. How we would know it is working The metric that matters here is unusual because it is explicitly a survival metric, not a construction metric. The headline number is the count and persistence of functioning conservation assets per panchayat; assets confirmed working in a later dry season, not assets photographed on the day they were built. That distinction is the whole point of the program, so the measurement enforces it: an asset that fails its dry-season re-check is removed from 145