KERALA RISING · FROM EXPORTING PEOPLE TO EXPORTING IDEAS 21. The hardest questions, answered Each program chapter answered the objections to that program. This chapter answers the harder ones; the objections a Chief Secretary or a finance minister raises not to a program but to the whole idea of building the institution at all. The previous two chapters raised the ceiling, naming what this could become at its most ambitious. Intellectual honesty now requires the opposite move: lowering it to the hardest objections a sceptic can put, because a vision that cannot survive a Chief Secretary’s scepticism is not worth the paper it is printed on. The per-program objections in Part Two are real but local. The objections that decide whether this happens are raised one level up, about the enterprise itself. They deserve direct answers, and the answers are stronger when the objection is stated at its most forceful rather than softened. ‘Why an institution? Just procure each program from a vendor.’ This is the most important objection, because it is the default. The answer is the entire economic argument of the book in one line: procuring seven programs from vendors means paying seven times 282