KERALA RISING · FROM EXPORTING PEOPLE TO EXPORTING IDEAS trivially affordable within a year or two as frontiermodel prices fall. The set of programs the institution can run is therefore not fixed; it expands automatically as inference cheapens, without any new decision by the state. The machine the state capitalises once becomes capable of more every year, at lower cost; which is as close to a free option on future civic capability as a public budget is ever offered. THE MONEY ARGUMENT, DISTILLED Verification costs a fraction of a rupee; the budgets it serves run to thousands of crores, and the platform’s shared revenue lines grow with every program. The AI is a rounding error that unlocks an enormous existing spend, gets cheaper every year, and the machine that runs it earns enough to stop being a cost to the state. 97