Your Turn, Keralam

This is an invitation to add your own view to the series. The series has argued that Keralam manufactured the hardest input a modern economy needs, then watched much of it leave. It has proposed answers: an apprenticeship system rebuilt on the literacy already achieved; research depth instead of publication counts; builders rather than investors; one industry chosen and built whole; an ecological estate restored rather than spent down; and cities that work with their water instead of paving over it.

It also leaves you with specifics. Thorium separated at Aluva and stockpiled, most of it still waiting for a use. A waterway network of 1,687 kilometres, whose one national waterway carried cargo along only 37 of them in 2014-15. An Irrigation Department unable to say how much of its canal network has been encroached upon because the boundaries were never surveyed. A civic machine capable of reaching almost any household in the state, but rarely asked to move an idea at the same scale.

Every one of those propositions is arguable. Several may be wrong.

What the series has not done is ask you anything.

The final essay will be my answer to the questions below. Yours will differ. If the answers that come back make a better case than mine, I will write a version of that essay built on them.

Why this is harder than it looks

There is an easy version of this exercise. Someone asks you to imagine a better future; you face no particular constraints; and you produce something pleasant and general. More jobs. Cleaner rivers. Young people staying.

This is the other version. You have just read nine essays of numbers, constraints and named institutions, several of which argue that the obvious answer is the wrong one.

Imagining freely and imagining against a dossier are different exercises. The second is harder. It is also the only one worth doing here.

You do not have to agree with any of it. The third question exists for readers who think the series has the wrong end of the stick.

What happens to what you write

I will read every response. I will not publish or quote anything with your name attached unless I ask you first, and answering does not subscribe you to anything.

You will receive one email asking you to confirm your address. I do not read or use your response unless you confirm it, and I delete it if you never do. It is a small check that keeps the conversation usable.

The question is not whether Keralam can become an imagined future elsewhere. It is what this particular place should become, and what it should refuse to become, with the institutions and landscape it already has.

Answer one question or all three. A paragraph is an answer. So is a page.