Daybreak

From airports to cricket broadcasts, India's family conglomerates keep turning up everywhere. According to the 2024 Barclays-Hurun report, one family's wealth alone equals nearly one-tenth of everything India produces in a year. India is running a version of the economic playbook that South Korea and Indonesia once ran — protect your conglomerates and let them do the building.South Korea came through it, at enormous political and economic cost. Indonesia's economy contracted by 13% in a single year.India is somewhere earlier in that story. In this episode of Daybreak, host Snigdha Sharma asks which ending we are heading toward.**This episode was first published on 26 May, 2026Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India's first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.

If you search "diabetes blood sugar level" on Google, the AI overview gives you a number. The number is wrong, the source is a hospital website, and the article on that website was written by AI.This is the loop: AI writes flawed medical content for hospital websites, AI search tools treat it as authoritative, and the final result is patients make health decisions based on it. An audit of nearly 500 articles across Apollo, Max, Fortis, Medanta, and Artemis found incorrect drug recommendations, outdated protocols, and Western benchmarks applied to Indian patients.Nobody is legally responsible. Nobody is fixing it.Tune in.Listen to the Zero Shot episode here.Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India's first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.

Tenants across India's six biggest metros have handed landlords Rs 1.26 trillion in security deposits, a new NoBroker study estimates. Around $15 billion of tenant money, refundable in name, sits in landlords' accounts earning interest for people it does not belong to. In this episode, host Snigdha Sharma ask what a deposit actually costs a renter, and arrives at a number: nearly a month's rent, every year. The same tenant who pays 2 months' deposit in Mumbai is asked for 10 in Bengaluru, and in Delhi NCR, about 4 in 10 never got their full deposit back. Renting was meant to be a phase. But with home ownership drifting out of reach, tenants may be extending this loan for decades.Tune in.Recommendations:It sucks to be a tenant in Bengaluru right now*Take The Ken's audit hereDaybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India's first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.

Cred just reported its first profitable quarter. Meta invested 8,500 crore rupees. And Kunal Shah walked out the door.Eight years of questions about Cred's business model ended the moment it finally had answers. The design-first, exclusivity-obsessed fintech that rewarded creditworthy Indians with gold credit cards now makes most of its money from lending — the same way every other UPI app does.Shah left for WhatsApp. Meta needed someone who could monetise a billion Indian users without making regulators nervous. What that means for both companies is the more interesting question.Scripted by Snigdha Sharma based on the report by Suprita Anupam.Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India's first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.

Netflix built its empire on one idea: watch what you want, when you want, all at once. Now it's losing viewers to YouTube, struggling to bring audiences back for season two, and internally discussing always-on live channels and ad bundles you can't skip.Which is to say: it's considering becoming cable TV.The irony is that while Netflix is scrambling for answers in the US, India may already have one. A reality show that airs almost every night at 8pm just cracked Netflix's global top 10. The format that streaming was supposed to kill is doing just fine. And Netflix is finally realising why.Tune in.Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India's first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.

In October last year, a ship owned by Adani Ports slowed to less than one knot near Malta. It held that position for over seven days, directly above the cables linking Malta to Sicily. It was no accident. India's largest private port operator has quietly built a fleet of more than a hundred vessels across 12 countries. Their job is servicing the world's offshore energy infrastructure. The business grew 134% in a single year. Ports made Adani rich. But there are only so many ports you can build. What the conglomerate does next may depend on waters far from any dock. Tune in.Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India's first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.

In April, India made AI education mandatory across 28,000 CBSE schools, giving them 90 days to comply. Most had already finalised their academic calendars for the year.Some schools were ready. Others scrambled. A few found that the harder problem wasn't the teachers — it was the students. At one Hyderabad school already using an AI learning tool, kids were From 2029, AI becomes a compulsory board exam subject and the government is betting that deadline will change everything.Tune in.Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India's first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.

Naresh drives for Rapido. When his phone died, so did his income — for seven days, until he could borrow enough to replace it.Until 2024, India's biggest consumer lenders had turned that exact vulnerability into a recovery tool. Miss an EMI, lose your phone. It worked so well that smartphone lending grew from 1% to nearly 40% of consumer borrowing in three years. Then the RBI banned it. Lending collapsed by 80%. Delinquencies rose. Rejection rates hit 50%.Now the tool is coming back. This time with guardrails. The question is whether they're enough.*We want to get to know you a little better. Tell us what you think about Daybreak here.Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India's first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.

Last week, the government ordered Apple and Google to pull at least three battery management system or BMS apps that were being used to switch off e-rickshaws mid-road. If you've been on Instagram, you've seen the videos. A prankster opens the app, taps a switch, and a passing e-rickshaw just dies.It works because the cheap lithium batteries these vehicles run on often ship from China with their Bluetooth wide open, no password at all. The flaw was documented publicly years ago and nothing happened until it went viral. The batteries are still exposed. In this episode, host Snigdha Sharma asks what really governs safety in India's informal economy.Tune in.*We want to get to know you a little better. Tell us what you think about Daybreak here.Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India's first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.

WhatsApp just announced usernames for Indian users. Two days later, the Indian government told it to stop.The privacy case for usernames is real — phone numbers are permanent, linked to everything, and once shared, impossible to take back. But India already has 43,000 WhatsApp-related cybercrimes in a single quarter. And when TechCrunch tested the feature, handles like "rbi_verify," "indiamodi," and "ambanijio" were still available for anyone who gets there first.WhatsApp has until tomorrow to explain itself to MeitY. And even if the deadline keeps getting extended, the problem isn't going away.Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India's first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.

Your AC is running longer this year and the machines responsible may have been designed for a different climate entirely. Optimist, a two-year-old Gurugram startup, has built what it says is India's most energy-efficient residential AC. It is recalibrated for Indian humidity, sourced almost entirely from local suppliers, and engineered with components the industry has long considered too expensive to bother with. But 70% of AC sales in India happen offline, shelf space belongs to brands with decades of dealer relationships, and Optimist is nowhere on the floor yet. How long can a better product afford to wait? Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India's first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.

In May, L'Oréal ended a 16-year agency relationship. The reason? Simply that a competitor was better prepared with better data and AI capabilities.This incident illustrates the shift that's happening in advertising right now. The agencies that bet on technology early are pulling ahead. The ones that are built on relationships are finding out how quickly those erode.Sitting unnoticed at the top of this reshuffled industry is Accenture Song. It's the world's largest advertising agency that doesn't really call itself one. It made 20 billion dollars last year. And it's barely visible in India. And that lack of visibility? That's by design.Tune in.Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India's first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.

When a bill arrives, what do you pay it with? That's the question running underneath this week's Daybreak roundup. The government of India is answering it with slices of LIC and other PSUs, because the American war in Iran has kept oil expensive and the budget is straining. OYO's parent is answering it with money from public investors, most of which will go straight to its lenders. Google spent eight years arguing it shouldn't have to answer at all, until Europe's top court settled the matter this week. And then there's UPI, which has never sent anyone a bill in its life. Its June numbers just hinted at why that might not last forever.Tune in.*We want to get to know you a little better. Tell us what you think about Daybreak here.Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India's first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.

Some of India's biggest consumer platforms, Swiggy, Zomato's parent Eternal, Zepto, Urban Company, and Meesho's logistics arm Valmo, have asked the Karnataka High Court to strike down the state's gig worker welfare law entirely.Their central argument is about money, a welfare fee they say duplicates a national contribution already required under the Code on Social Security. But the petition goes further, also targeting a clause that lets workers ask platforms how their pay and ratings get decided.A welfare fee is due July 5 regardless of how the case unfolds, and other states building similar laws are watching closely to see what survives. The platforms call the clause a threat to trade secrets. The law calls it a question a worker is allowed to ask. Which one is it?Tune in.*We want to get to know you a little better. Tell us what you think about Daybreak here.Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India's first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.

Before every August, Indians who've been nursing a cracked screen or a lagging phone make the same calculation: wait for the festive season. The discounts will come. After all, they always do.This year, they might not.AI data centres are consuming more than 70% of high-end memory chip production. The same chips that go into your phone. Apple has already raised Mac and iPad prices. Budget Android phones in India are up 30 to 40% since January. And the shortage isn't expected to ease until 2027.Tune in.*We want to get to know you a little better. Tell us what you think about Daybreak here.Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India's first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.

Lightrock arrived in India with nearly a billion dollars and royal backing — the Liechtenstein dynasty's centuries-old fortune funding bets on around 40 growth-stage startups.The firm moved fast, doubled down on existing investments more aggressively than most peers, and scaled hard during the zero-interest-rate boom. Then the cycle turned. Its portfolio — Waycool, Pharmeasy, Dunzo — ran into trouble. New cheques dried up.Lightrock shifted from investor to caretaker, managing what it had rather than building what came next. A royal wager on Indian tech, still waiting for a payoff.Tune in.*This episode was originally published on 24th April 2026.Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India's first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.

K12 Techno Services has a very specific type of school it likes to find. They're old, debt-ridden, maybe run by an ageing owner with no succession plan. It moves in, rebrands it Orchids, adds a basketball court, and locks the deal in for 50 years. Ownership never changes hands. The management, though, does.The model is built for patience. It takes 12 years for a school to turn a profit. But K12's cap table is full of private equity firms running on 10-year fund cycles, and they need a way out.So what happens when a business built for the long game has to keep moving fast?Tune in.*We want to get to know you a little better. Tell us what you think about Daybreak here.Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India's first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.

Take the Daybreak listener survey here.Meet Ranjan. He works at Deloitte by day and spends his evenings strapping a camera to his forehead, recording himself doing household chores by evening. He's a physical AI trainer, a part of a growing gig economy built around creating training data to teach humanoid robots human behaviour.Reporter Sakshi Sadashiv joins host Rachel Varghese to break down how this supply chain works: from gig workers in Delhi, to the firms like Tesla and Nvidia that eventually buy their footage from the companies that vet, annotate and package it for sale. And why this feels like a pattern India has been in before.*Read Sakshi's original story here.

This week, Instagram expanded its TV app to Samsung Smart TVs, joining Amazon Fire and Google TV, and announced it is testing episodic series and live creator experiences for the big screen. The announcement is the latest move in an eight-year pattern — a platform that keeps giving creators more time, more formats, and now a larger screen. Instagram tried long-form video once before. It called it IGTV, and shut it down three years later.So if short-form video was supposed to be the future, why does Instagram keep making it longer?Tune in. Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India's first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.

On June 11th, TCS announced an exclusive partnership with Anthropic — 50,000 employees trained on Claude, early access to new models, a dedicated business unit. The next day, a US export control order cut off access to Anthropic's most advanced models for users worldwide, including the very partner that had just signed up for early access.India's IT sector has spent years building its AI pivot on the assumption that access to frontier models would stay open. That assumption just cracked. And while India accelerates its own sovereign AI mission, analysts say that alone won't be enough to fix what just happened.So what would?Tune in.Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India's first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.

India's telcos looked like the obvious gateway for AI companies chasing scale. With nearly 900 million subscribers between them, Jio and Airtel could put an AI product in front of more users faster than almost any other distribution channel in the world. So Google paid Jio and Perplexity paid Airtel. Both spent tens of thousands of rupees per user to make it work. One partnership is still standing but the other collapsed before its time was up. And OpenAI — the company with the largest AI user base in India — skipped the telco route entirely. What does OpenAI know about this model that the others are still learning?Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India's first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.

In 2022, Mamaearth's founder made two unusual logistics bets: one on a shipping aggregator and one on a small Delhi drone startup nobody had heard of. Now, four years later, those bets have converged into one of India's fastest-growing logistics categories.Drones are now flying blood samples to hospital labs in 10 minutes instead of four hours. They're cutting delivery costs for D2C brands trying to escape marketplace commissions. They're even moving parcels between dark stores for Zepto.But the economics only work in certain places. And India's regulations weren't built with any of this in mind.Tune in.Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India's first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.

2026 was the first IPL season after India banned online real money gaming last year. The platforms were gone and the payment gateways were blocked. The government had made its position clear. The betting, however, did not stop. The Ken's Mrunmayee Kulkarni went looking for where it went and found it hiding inside something the government itself built. On platforms like 99 Exchange, gamblers deposit and withdraw money directly through UPI, gambler to gambler, with no mule network and no victim to file a complaint. But the ED's tools were designed for a system that leaves a trail. This one doesn't.In this episode, Mrunmayee joins host Snigdha Sharma to walk through how the money actually moves, and why the enforcement machinery has no good answer for it yet.Tune in.Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India's first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.

India's southwest monsoon is running 35% below normal. Mumbai's reservoirs are at 12% of capacity. And the rain that should have arrived by June 11th still hasn't. The same water and power systems that keep this economy running are now being asked to power India's AI future too — a $180 billion data centre bet that nobody is stress-testing against a failing monsoon and climate change. The groundwater is already over-extracted. The grid hit an all-time demand record in May. And the choice about who gets water first when there isn't enough has already been written into law in some states. But almost nobody wants to say it out loud. Tune in.Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India's first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.

Zepto just filed its DRHP. It wants to open 1,900 new dark stores, on top of the 1,139 it already runs. Blinkit, the only profitable player in the sector, is racing to 3,000 stores by March 2027. Meanwhile, its adjusted EBITDA is just Rs. 37 crores — not a lot considering the billions that have been spent on getting it to profitability.The dark store is quick commerce's core bet — and its biggest fixed cost. Rents are rising, FMCG prices are up, and user growth at Zepto actually declined between December and March despite spending over Rs 1,300 crore on advertising.The model is scaling. But will the economics ever catch up?Tune in.Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India's first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.

India is spending over 10,000 crore rupees building what it calls sovereign AI. The servers are going up in Mumba and the ministers are saying the word at every summit. There is just one problem: nobody has defined what sovereign actually means.  And the chips powering all of it are American, subject to American law. A US subpoena can reach a data centre in Mumbai as easily as one in Seattle. In this edition of Make in India Competitive Again, The Ken reporter Mrunmayee Kulkarni delves into what this really means.Listen a free episode of The Ken's First Principles feat Riyaz Amlaani with Rohin Dharmakumar hereDaybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India's first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.

Amazon Now launched in September 2025. It was already two years behind Flipkart, and well behind Blinkit and Zepto. Nine months later, it's doing 450,000 to 500,000 orders a day, expanding to 100 cities, and a Blinkit executive is walking through Colaba market, stopping in front of an Amazon dark store in a location Blinkit's expansion head could only dream of.Amazon has something its rivals don't: 150 million Prime members who already shop five times more frequently. And since bundling quick commerce with Prime, their order frequency has tripled.Tune in.Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India's first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.

Adani started buying apples in Himachal Pradesh two decades ago. Not because it wanted to be in the fruit business — but because it wanted to own the cold chain that nobody else was building.Now the India-New Zealand free trade agreement is about to test Indian apple growers like never before. New Zealand yields 50 to 70 tonnes per hectare. Himachal Pradesh averages 7 to 8.Adani just expanded into cherries, plums, and peaches — fruits even more perishable than apples. The bet is the same as it always was: whoever controls refrigeration, controls the market.Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India's first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.

This week, Nepal sent Indian mango shipments back to the border after inspectors found excessive pesticide residues . A few weeks earlier, Japan had suspended all Indian mango imports after a biosecurity inspection failure at a treatment facility in Uttar Pradesh. Two bans in one season and this was before the war in Iran tripled freight costs and shut the Gulf route entirely. Mirza Ghalib, the famous Urdu poet, famously had just two requirements of a mango — to be sweet and plentiful. This season, the country that grows half the world's supply couldn't guarantee either to the rest of the world. How did we get here? Host Snigdha Sharma explores.Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India's first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.

India just found natural gas off the Andaman coast. The energy minister called it "an ocean of energy opportunities." Considering India's energy vulnerabilities, this is a significant find, even if commercial production is a decade away.Because in the meantime, the war on Iran has doubled LNG prices, cut off Qatar (which supplied nearly half of India's imports) and pushed India into buying six times more American gas than it was before the conflict began. The US has already used energy as a bargaining chip in the tariff standoff last year, putting India again in a tough spot.But now analysts are predicting a global LNG glut. And while cheaper imports do sound like relief, they might just be another trap.Read Blas's piece here.Read Anand's piece for The Ken here.Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India's first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.

Every month, millions of Indians pay their LIC premium without a second thought. What they don't realise is that money is quietly buying up India's most beaten-down stocks — the ones foreign investors are dumping, the ones mutual funds won't touch, the ones everyone else is running from.For decades, LIC was the only institution large enough to hold Indian markets together during a sell-off. That role now has company. SIP money has grown into a second pillar of domestic support, and LIC's grip on the market is loosening.But its investing instincts? Still the sharpest in the room.Tune in.Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India's first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.

Two million students. One lakh twenty thousand seats. And a paper that leaked before anyone sat down to write it.This is the second NEET leak in two years. The National Testing Agency was created specifically to prevent this. A parliamentary panel had already warned, after last year's controversy, that the NTA was too dependent on private vendors and lacked the institutional capacity to run exams at this scale. The government's response: move the exam online by 2027.But NTA's own tech partners have a track record that makes that solution harder to trust than it sounds.Tune in.Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India's first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.

Amazon built a leaderboard to track how much AI its engineers were using. Employees gamed it. Costs exploded. Last week, the leaderboard was gone.Uber burned through its entire annual AI budget in four months — after telling staff to use AI "as much as possible." Microsoft cancelled most of its Claude Code licences six months after rolling them out.Three companies, the same couple months, the same lesson: that measuring AI adoption is turning out to be a very different thing from measuring AI productivity.Tune in.Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India's first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.

Andhra Pradesh wants to be India's data centre capital. Google, Meta, and Reliance have all been promised space in Vizag. To make it work, the state did something it has never done before — handed Google its own electricity licence, letting it bypass the state grid entirely.The logic is straightforward. The consequences are not. When large consumers leave the grid, electricity gets more expensive for everyone else. Farmers lose subsidies. Factories pay more. Coal plants stay open longer than planned.And somewhere in Vizag, a data centre is being built 120 metres from the city's drinking water reservoir.Host Rachel Varghese and reporter Mrunmayee Kulkarni discuss.Read Mrunmayee's story on the electric grid load here.Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India's first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.

Anthropic raised $65 billion last week making it the largest funding round in AI history. It also filed for an IPO days later. So did OpenAI and SpaceX after its merger with xAI. Three of the most powerful AI companies in the world are heading to public markets in the same window. They're flush with capital but burning through more than they earn. Meanwhile, the startups that were supposed to be the next wave are being quietly absorbed. The funds that would have backed them are drying up. So what exactly does the future of AI entrepreneurship look like from here on?Tune in.Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India's first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.

Swiggy CEO Sriharsha Majety told Bloomberg in an interview last week that his company would stay out of the spending war being waged by Amazon, Flipkart, and Reliance in India's quick commerce market. He invoked the Airtel-Jio price war as a precedent, argued that chasing market share through discounts only postpones the problem, and said Swiggy has Rs 15,000 crore in the bank to play the long game.But Swiggy invented this category. And Blinkit, which came years later, now has twice the dark stores, twice the users, and losses that are narrowing. So is this a strategy or a rationalisation?Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India's first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.

Seventeen foreign universities have set up campuses in India in two years. Most can't fill their seats. And a Rs 1,000 crore scholarship push launched last month is the most visible sign yet that something isn't working.The pitch is this: a western degree without the visa hassle, at Rs 15 to 25 lakh a year, which is roughly what Ashoka and Plaksha charge, but without the research environment or the actual campus. Students who wanted to leave India aren't particularly interested in a single-floor setup in a Gift City corporate building.So why are so many foreign universities suddenly this desperate for Indian students?Tune in to find out.*Correction: The host mentions that Emeritus is the parent company of Eruditus. Eruditus is the company that has partnered with seven schools for a revenue-sharing model, not Emeritus. Emeritus is a brand under Eruditus. *Clarification: The profit Eruditus posted of $400 million is independent of its partnerships with the universities. Classes under this partnership are yet to start and has made no revenue yet.Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India's first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.

India has pumped over $33 billion into BSNL since 2019. But the person running the company finds out every three months if they still have the job.Multiple candidates have been interviewed for the full-time position but no one has been hired yet.The finances have improved in the last two years but the telco's market position has kept sliding. And the decisions that actually matter — where to launch 5G, which markets to chase, what kind of company BSNL even wants to be — are all waiting on a leader who might not be around to see them through.So what happens to a $33 billion bet when no one's really in charge?Tune in to find out.Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India's first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.

A mutual fund executive told our colleague something shocking: "SIPs are a problem."Part of the shock came from the fact that it  was coming from someone in an industry that was basically built on "SIP sahi hai."Now a new research paper backs up that controversial take—and the findings contradict what millions of Indian investors have been told about systematic investment plans.Turns out the marketing narrative around SIPs has some serious gaps. The math tells a different story. And with small-cap SIP assets exploding 6.5x since 2019, the stakes have never been higher.So when are SIPs actually appropriate?Tune in.*This episode was originally published on February 16th 2026.Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India's first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.

In 1998, a Metal Gear Solid villain named Psycho Mantis read your memory card out loud and made your controller vibrate on its own. Players were stunned. It felt like a genuine invasion. And they loved it.In 2026, Microsoft built an Xbox assistant that could do roughly the same thing. Plus some more. Track your history, read your screen, coach you through the game. Players were stunned. It felt like a genuine invasion. And they hated it.The viral hate train began in March 2026. Two months later, the new Xbox CEO killed it.The backlash wasn't really about the technology. It was about what the technology misunderstood. Game design requires a careful balance between challenge and ease that makes it worth playing. And an AI assistant wasn't really reducing friction, it just introduced a different, kind of insulting type.So where does AI actually belong in gaming?Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India's first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.

From airports to cricket broadcasts, India's family conglomerates keep turning up everywhere. According to the 2024 Barclays-Hurun report, one family's wealth alone equals nearly one-tenth of everything India produces in a year. India is running a version of the economic playbook that South Korea and Indonesia once ran — protect your conglomerates and let them do the building.South Korea came through it, at enormous political and economic cost. Indonesia's economy contracted by 13% in a single year.India is somewhere earlier in that story. In this episode of Daybreak, host Snigdha Sharma asks which ending we are heading toward.Listen to the episode on Adani's think tank here.Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India's first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.

Bookmyshow has spent two decades building India's live events business. It organised Coldplay's India tour, controls 70% of online movie ticketing, and has long-term exclusive deals with nearly every major multiplex chain.Then Zomato launched District in August 2024. In its first full year, it quadrupled revenue, edged past Bookmyshow on app downloads, and became the exclusive ticketing partner for half the IPL. It's still losing money. Eternal doesn't seem to mind.Because District isn't trying to beat Bookmyshow at its own game. It's building a different one entirely.Tune in.Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India's first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.

On Wednesday, Meta began firing 8,000 people.This makes up 10% of its global workforce. The cuts started at 4am on 20 May, rolling across time zones. People found out by email. Meta's quarterly revenue that same week: $56 billion. It's capex guidance for 2026: up to $145 billion, almost all of it going into AI. This is the current trend in Big Tech: record profits, mass layoffs, redirect to machines, repeat. Then, closer home: Unacademy is being sold to upGrad for $218 million — over 90% below its 2021 peak of $3.44 billion. The edtech gold rush is over and what's left is the reckoning.Tune in.Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India's first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.

Adani Group has spent the last decade building India's largest private airport empire. But owning nine airports turned out to be only the beginning.From aircraft maintenance to pilot training to ground handling, the group is now reaching into every corner of the aviation business. Airlines operating at Adani airports are already feeling the squeeze — on pricing, on vendor choice, on the terms of doing business.India has never had a single player control this much of the aviation stack. Are the regulators keeping up?Tune in.Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India's first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.

Virat Kohli's new Meta Oakley ad has 40 million views in two weeks — more than every other athlete in the global campaign, including the one that aired during Superbowl. The tagline says Athletic Intelligence is here. But the ad shows the glasses answering questions, playing music, and recording a slow-motion shot. The athletic part is mostly just Kohli.India's smart wearables market is set to triple by 2033. Fifty million Indians already make health decisions based on what these devices tell them. Studies show a 30-80% error rate on something as basic as calorie counting. So how intelligent is Athletic Intelligence, really?Tune in.Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India's first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.

Three weeks before the FIFA World Cup kicks off in the US, India still does not have a broadcaster for the tournament. JioStar offered $20 million. FIFA said no. Sony did not bid at all. A petition has reached the Delhi High Court asking that matches at least air on Doordarshan.The easy explanation is that FIFA got greedy. But that does not explain how the world's biggest sporting event ends up with no takers in a country with more than 300 million football fans.In today's episode, host Snigdha Sharma looks at what FIFA fundamentally misunderstood about India as a football market. And how one merger  gave Reliance enough power that left FIFA with nowhere else to go.Tune in.Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India's first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.

The Indian government just moved two million email accounts off NIC's servers onto Zoho's cloud. The reason the government decided to leave behind a system it had built and run for 40 years? A list of issues; including ransomware attacks, power outages, and even a blackout on a New Year's Eve that knocked out Parliament's website.The fix was a seven-year, 200 crore rupee contract with a private Indian company. Zoho actually scored lower than Google and Microsoft in the government's own assessment. Bur it won the assessment anyway.Thing is, India spent years building open-source infrastructure to stay independent. The question is whether it just traded one dependency for another.Tune in.Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India's first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.

Jio Studios is now the largest production house in India by revenue, catalogue, and box-office share. It got there fast. Stree 2, Laapataa Ladies, Dhurandhar, all Jio. The Dhurandhar franchise alone is closing in on Rs 3,000 crore worldwide. Meanwhile, Dharma, Excel, Maddock, and Bhansali have all sold significant stakes just to stay in the game. Jio simply does not need to. It has Reliance's telecom network, streaming platform, and marketing muscle all working together. The studio model that Bollywood once abandoned is back. But can Jio can build an identity to go with it?Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India's first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.

Gen Z was supposed to be AI's most enthusiastic adopters. For a while, they were. Then the hiring froze, the jobs disappeared, and the tools got good enough to make the question uncomfortably personal.Excitement about AI among Gen Z is down 15% since last year. Anger is up 9%. But the more interesting story isn't the sentiment shift — it's what's happening underneath it. Writing skills degrading without anyone noticing. Complacency creeping in. A generation becoming, in one colleague's words, more boring.The curiosity is there and so is the dread. And, often in the same person.Tune in.Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India's first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.

Air India's board met in Mumbai last week to discuss cost cuts, CEO succession, and whether to start charging business class passengers separately for meals and lounge access. The airline is projecting losses exceeding ₹22,000 crore for the financial year just ended, nearly double the year before. Campbell Wilson is stepping down as CEO. International flights are being cut by over 20%. Jet fuel costs are up 63% since the war on Iran began. But the crisis arrived at an airline already deep in trouble. In today's episode, we look at what was happening inside the Tata turnaround long before the war on Iran began.Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India's first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.

On a Wednesday morning in April, The Ken's Mrunmayee Kulkarni went to Rushikonda beach in Visakhapatnam looking for a manhole. She found it — a concrete chamber with a reinforced lid, no armed guard, no exclusion zone, no legal protection. In a few years, it will be one of the landing points for the world's longest undersea cable.95% of India's internet — every payment, every message, a $341 billion services economy — runs through cables like this. The nearest repair ship is in Singapore. There is no protection law. And 60% of that traffic runs through a war zone.What happens if something goes wrong?Tune in.Read Mrunmayee's story here.Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India's first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.