KERALA RISING · FROM EXPORTING PEOPLE TO EXPORTING IDEAS the shape of the arithmetic so a finance reviewer can replace them with the state’s own. Nothing here is a forecast. Consider a base-case path. The state capitalises the institution once to found it and build the eight-component stack, released against milestones rather than as a lump sum. In the first operating period the institution runs the cleanliness program in a handful of corridors; verification volume is modest, the inference bill is negligible, and almost the entire operating cost is the Keralabased team, field coordination, and audit. Revenue in this period is small; a first cohort of Reward Partners and a few early patrons, and the state’s operating support carries most of the cost. In the next period cleanliness scales to a full municipal area and tourism activates on the same corridors. Now the revenue lines begin to compound: the Reward Partner base built by cleanliness is inherited by tourism at no new acquisition cost; the diaspora patron relationships opened for ancestral wards renew and widen; tourism operators pay to participate in a sector large enough that even modest per-operator revenue aggregates quickly. Operating cost rises far more slowly than revenue, because the stack is built and the marginal program is a configuration. The gap between cost and revenue narrows from both sides. In the period after that, two or three further programs run on the same corridors, the audited 254