KERALA RISING · FROM EXPORTING PEOPLE TO EXPORTING IDEAS and to generate the labelled data that retrains the classifier. The tiers exist so that expensive judgement is spent only where it is needed, which is what keeps the average cost per verification near the floor. Three design commitments govern the layer. It is conservative by default: when the model is uncertain, it under-credits rather than over-credits, because a falsely denied point costs a citizen a small annoyance while a falsely granted point costs the audit its credibility. It is inspectable: every verified fact carries its provenance; which model, what confidence, what checks passed, so a quarterly audit can reconstruct any decision. And it is correctable: because the corpus is public, systematic errors are visible to outsiders and can be challenged, which is a feature rather than a risk. The truer framing for a technical reviewer is that the layer does not need to be perfect; it needs to be cheap, conservative, auditable, and improvable, and it is all four. This tiering is also why the cost numbers in Chapter 5 hold up under scrutiny. A program does not run every submission through an expensive frontier model; it runs almost all of them through the cheap classifier and escalates only the hard minority. The blended cost is therefore much closer to the classifier’s floor than to the frontier model’s ceiling, and it falls every year as both tiers get cheaper. A reviewer who assumes every verification costs the 84