KERALA RISING · FROM EXPORTING PEOPLE TO EXPORTING IDEAS establish before any money or data flows than to retrofit afterwards. Weeks five to ten: build the thin slice The technical work begins with the narrowest possible end-to-end slice: one verified action, in one or two corridors, wired through identity, verification, the points ledger, and the public corpus. The classifier for the first action, waste segregation; is trained or fine-tuned on the partner department’s own category definitions. A first cohort of Reward Partners is signed in the launch corridor, and a handful of local creators are briefed. Nothing here is built for scale yet; it is built to prove the loop closes at all, with real citizens, in a real place. The deliverable at the end of this period is a working corridor, not a finished platform. Weeks eleven to sixteen: open the loop to citizens The launch corridor goes live. Citizens make verified deposits; points accrue and redeem at the Reward Partners; the leaderboard begins to fill; creators carry the launch to the under-35 cohort. The institution watches the engine’s mechanics in the wild and tunes them: the reward pricing, the leaderboard’s competitive units, the model’s confidence thresholds. The first patron. Likely a diaspora chapter with roots in the corridor, is brought in and given the audited quarterly reporting 326