KERALA RISING · FROM EXPORTING PEOPLE TO EXPORTING IDEAS of a technology programme. Most systems get more expensive to run over time, as scope creeps and maintenance compounds. This one gets cheaper, because its core operating cost, inference, is on a steep downward curve. Equivalent the system capability has been getting roughly ten times cheaper each year, which means a program designed against today’s prices will run on a fraction of that cost within a few years, even as volume grows. [5] This changes how a finance reviewer should think about the long horizon. A conventional technology cost projected forward compounds upward and eventually dominates a budget; this one, projected forward, shrinks toward zero as a share of operating cost. The people-and-coordination costs; the Keralabased team, field operators, audit, are real and will grow modestly with the programme, but the AI line, already a rounding error, becomes a smaller rounding error every year. A reviewer modelling a pessimistic case does not need to worry that the AI cost might balloon; the structural pressure runs entirely the other way, and the only honest risk to model is on the revenue ramp, not the compute bill. The same trend quietly widens the range of behaviours the machine can afford to verify. A civic action that is marginally too costly to verify at scale today, because it needs a frontier model on every submission rather than a cheap classifier. Becomes 96