KERALA RISING · FROM EXPORTING PEOPLE TO EXPORTING IDEAS Preface: a better Kerala is buildable This is not, at heart, a book about technology. It is a book about hope: the case that Kerala can become a model society again, and that the tools to do it are, for the first time, within reach and within budget. I grew up in Nellimukal, near Adoor, in a part of Kerala where the wells drop every March and the men leave for the Gulf and send money back to a place they ache for and cannot fix from a distance. I have watched my own family’s street stay dirty not because anyone wanted it dirty but because nobody could see that their own small effort mattered, and I have watched the same people segregate their waste faithfully the moment a neighbour started keeping count. That is the whole of this book, really, learned before I had the words for it: people will do the right thing readily, if only the doing is seen. Kerala has done extraordinary things by getting that one idea right. It taught India literacy, not by building more schools but by making reading a thing the whole society watched and celebrated until no one was left out. It taught India decentralisation, handing real power and budgets to panchayats. It built public health that the world studied. Each time, 31