KERALA RISING · FROM EXPORTING PEOPLE TO EXPORTING IDEAS much. The book’s grandest claim, that this makes Kerala a model others study, may simply not come true; the world may shrug. A success too small to notice is a kind of failure too, especially for a project that asked to be judged by its ambition. WHAT WOULD HAVE TO BE TRUE FOR THIS TO FAIL The behaviour does not transfer from logging to living; or fraud outpaces cheap verification; or the rewards entrench advantage; or the institution is captured or rots; or the technology proves dearer and worse in the field than on paper; or it all works and the result is merely marginal. Any one of these is fatal or disqualifying. The book’s answer is not that these cannot happen, but that a small, gated, independently-assessed pilot is exactly how a state finds out which of them is real before it has spent anything it cannot afford to lose. That is the honest reason to start small: not confidence, but doubt taken seriously. This chapter is the strongest argument in the book, in one sense, because a proposal that can survive its own prosecution is worth more than one that was only ever allowed to make its own case. The reader who is still interested after reading this is interested for the right reasons. The next decision, whether to test the idea against reality in one small place, should be made by someone who has read this chapter, not skipped it. 311