Kerala Rising: From Exporting People to Exporting Ideas · Page 244 of 353

KERALA RISING · FROM EXPORTING PEOPLE TO EXPORTING IDEAS

KERALA RISING · FROM EXPORTING PEOPLE TO EXPORTING IDEAS
to fear. Publishing the corpus quarterly as open data
turns the institution’s most sensitive asset into its
most public one, which is both the strongest possible
discipline on the institution’s own conduct and the
foundation of the data products that help fund it.
State ownership of the IP ensures the capability
cannot walk out of the door with a vendor or a
departing executive, and accepting CAG jurisdiction
by design signals, from the first day, that the
institution treats external performance audit as a
welcomed mechanism rather than a threat to be
managed.
Surplus reinvestment, finally, is what keeps the
institution’s commercial activity in service of its
mission rather than in competition with it. An
institution that earns revenue but cannot distribute
it to private parties, and must reinvest it under a
published policy, has its incentives aligned with
doing more civic good rather than extracting value.
Together the seven are not a list of virtues the
institution hopes to embody; they are seven specific
locks, each on a specific door through which publicinterest technology is known to escape.
Why apex-level
The institution reports to the AI Minister at the apex
of state government, not nested under any one
mission or department. A body that runs live, crossdepartmental civic operations cannot be
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