KERALA RISING · FROM EXPORTING PEOPLE TO EXPORTING IDEAS against current official data, not as a forecast. An assumptions register and a full reference list allow any number to be traced to its origin. For the purpose of an initial assessment, this is the right standard: the framework invites verification rather than asking for trust, and a department would be able to substitute its own figures wherever it chose. What pursuing it would, and would not, involve Should the framework ever be taken forward, the book is explicit that the commitment would be bounded and staged: a modest first application, an independent and published assessment of whether it worked, and a written protocol to stop if that assessment were negative, before any larger commitment followed. It would not require openended funding, because the costly elements are finite and the technology is cheap; it would not require a large irreversible decision, because each stage is a genuine go-or-no-go on evidence; and it would not create a body that displaces existing departments, the institution being designed to make the offices it works alongside more visibly effective rather than redundant. These are the book’s representations, and they are the right things for a department to test against its own rules, costs, and political realities before relying on them. 19