KERALA RISING · FROM EXPORTING PEOPLE TO EXPORTING IDEAS inference on commodity infrastructure, which is about two-hundredths of one Indian paisa. A general-purpose frontier vision model, reserved for hard or contested cases, costs on the order of US$0.002 per image, a little under two rupees. And the trend is steep: equivalent the system capability has been getting roughly ten times cheaper each year. A program designed today will run on cheaper inference every year it operates. [3] [4] [5] Put that against volume. Suppose a mature program verifies one million citizen actions a month; a very large number, far beyond early-stage activity. If every single one were checked by the routine classifier, the monthly inference bill would be on the order of a few hundred rupees. Even if a tenth of them were escalated to a frontier model for a harder judgement, the monthly bill would be in the low lakhs of rupees at most. These are amounts that disappear inside the rounding of a government budget line. To see how unusual this is, contrast it with how AI costs are usually discussed. The reason enterprises worry about inference bills is that they run frontier models, with long prompts and long outputs, on every request, and chain many such requests together, a workload whose per-call cost is cents to tens of cents and whose volume is enormous. This program is the opposite workload: a single, short, image-classification call per civic action, on the 88