KERALA RISING · FROM EXPORTING PEOPLE TO EXPORTING IDEAS intelligence, costs what Chapter 5 established: a fraction of a rupee per verification, and it falls every year. Across all programs combined, even at mature state-wide volumes, inference is a low-single-digit share of operating cost, dominated by people and field coordination. The chapter’s headline finding is therefore counter-intuitive and worth stating plainly: the AI is the cheapest thing the institution does. WH A T I T C OV E RS ROUGH S H A RE O F M ULTI - Y E A R C OST One-time build Institution founding + reusable stack (the eight components) Largest single block, front-loaded Core team & ops Kerala engineers, field coordination, audit, events Largest recurring block COST LAYER Routine classifier + Inference (the AI) frontier escalations, all programs Marginal per program Low single-digit %, falling yearly Configuration of an existing stack A fraction of the build, for a new each time outcome Exhibit 12 – The cost structure. Inference is on purpose broken out to show how small it is; the institution is a people-and-coordination cost, not an AI cost. 250