KERALA RISING · FROM EXPORTING PEOPLE TO EXPORTING IDEAS enough of them will switch or add at the margin. That is a far more modest and more testable proposition. The pilot will show, in one corridor, whether local businesses actually subscribe and whether a patron actually commits, and if they do not at small scale, the model is revised before any larger commitment. The revenue lines are not promises; they are hypotheses grounded in existing spending, each falsifiable cheaply in the first corridor. The set is also deliberately diversified, which is what makes the institution’s finances robust rather than fragile. No single line has to carry the institution: if patronage is slower than hoped, Reward Partner subscriptions and tourism contracts can carry more; if the data products take years to mature, the nearer-term lines bridge the gap. A platform dependent on one revenue source is hostage to it; this one spreads its dependence across six lines anchored in six different kinds of existing spending, so that a shortfall in any one is absorbable rather than fatal. Diversification of revenue is the financial counterpart to the diversification of programs, both are ways of ensuring that no single failure can bring down the whole. Why the economics get better every year There is one more property of the cost side worth drawing out, because it inverts the usual trajectory 95