KERALA RISING · FROM EXPORTING PEOPLE TO EXPORTING IDEAS It may deepen the inequality it claims to close The households with the best phones, the most time, and the most fluency will find it easiest to participate and to win, and the rewards will flow to them, widening the very gap a public institution exists to narrow. The book proposes participationrate leaderboards and assisted logging as correctives, but these are untested at scale, and the honest position is that a recognition economy could entrench advantage as easily as it distributes it. If it does, the framework will have used public money to make the comfortable more comfortable, and it should be stopped on those grounds alone, regardless of how clean the streets become. The institution may rot, capture, or be captured The book asks the state to build a permanent body that records civic behaviour at population scale, and trusts a structure of non-transferable vehicles and audits to keep it honest across decades. Structures fail. A future board may quietly commercialise the corpus; a government may lean on the institution to reward the politically convenient and ignore the inconvenient; the audit may become a formality. A permanent institution is a permanent target, and the larger and more useful its database of who-did-what becomes, the more valuable it is to capture and the more dangerous it is if captured. The book’s 309