Daybreak

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.

India's carmakers are staring down a deadline. In less than a year, new emission norms will require them to dramatically cut their carbon output — or pay hundreds of millions of dollars in fines. Electric vehicles were supposed to be the answer. But the batteries aren't ready, the infrastructure isn't there, and adoption has been slower than anyone predicted.So the industry has quietly pivoted to an unlikely stopgap: CNG. Tata, Maruti, and Hyundai are all betting on it. In fact, two in every five Maruti cars sold last year ran on the fuel. But a stopgap is still just a stopgap.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 best AI models are confidently wrong. Not occasionally — structurally. If you put two unrelated ideas into a prompt, the model will usually invent a connection rather than admit that none exists.In this piece, The Ken's Debanjali Biswas traces what a five-month study of leading AI models — from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google — actually found about how they reason. The results landed almost every model in what researchers are calling the "danger zone", which shows high confidence and low accuracy.This is a read aloud of Debanjali's original story, by Rachel Varghese, on Daybreak.

A two-year-old think tank backed by Adani just got 14 of its suggestions, some of them word for word, written into a law passed by Parliament. That law opened India's nuclear sector to private players for the first time in history. Months later, Adani floated a new subsidiary to enter the same field.The think tank is called Chintan Research Foundation. It started in a South Delhi cafe. It calls itself independent. And it's now one of the more visible and contested players in Delhi's policy world.So what exactly does Rs 100 crore buy you in India's policy ecosystem?Also listen to: Friday Roundup: Adani goes nuclear and AI's talent exit

The Parle-G packet has cost five rupees since the 1990s. Once, when the company tried raising it by 50 paise, consumers switched to Britannia's Tiger within weeks. The price was rolled back. That's how sensitive this market is.But something else has been changing — quietly, and without announcement. The packet that was once 100 grams is now 45. And Parle-G isn't alone. Dabur, Britannia, Nestlé, Godrej — all cutting weight, all in the same quarter, all for the same reason.A war in West Asia has sent packaging costs up by 40 to 75%. The buffer won't last. What comes next?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.

West Bengal and Tamil Nadu declared their results yesterday. BJP swept Bengal after fifteen years of TMC rule. In Tamil Nadu, Vijay's TVK won, upending the DMK return almost everyone had predicted, including the platforms that had money on it.Prediction markets are now a $150 billion industry. And they were taking live bets on India's assembly elections, on a platform India officially banned last year. In a recent edition of The Ken's Make In India Competitive Again, Seema Singh wrote about an interesting research paper. While most assume the trading volumes were not high enough for concern, this peer-reviewed paper in Science says otherwise. In fact, this it says, it matters even when the volumes are thin, or maybe especially then. So what is India's ban actually achieving?Tune in.Also listen to: India banned online betting. Polymarket is wagering on our elections anyway. 

Market shocks hit retirees harder than anyone else. For those just retired or on the verge of it, a sharp early drop in portfolio value can cause damage that compounds quietly over decades, long after markets recover.The American war in Iran is the latest trigger. And it may not be the last.The good news: careful planning can offset the risk. A concept called the safe withdrawal rate, used correctly, can be the difference between a corpus that lasts 30 years and one that runs out in 20.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 November 2024, one of India's biggest FMCG companies, Hindustan Unilever, started getting a barrage of complaints from its consumers, who said they were seeing the same Dove and Surf Excel ads repeatedly on OTT platforms during a single watch session. Some of them were shown the same ads as many as 150 times within a week.With IPL around the corner, HUL — which spends nearly Rs 4,000 crore on ads annually — couldn't afford to ignore these complaints. So what followed was a series of investigations. And what they discovered has opened a real can of worms for not just JioHotstar, the platform streaming the IPL, but OTT platforms in general. The big issue is a serious mismatch between what was promised and what's actually being delivered for ad campaigns, according to seven insiders from HUL, Disney, and other industry rivals who spoke to The Ken.So what happens when a big spender starts feeling like it's not getting what it signed up for during the biggest streaming event of the year? The Ken reporter Rounak Kumar Gunjan speaks to Daybreak hosts Snigdha and Rahel.This episode was first published in February 2025. We're re-airing it now because IPL 2026 is live, and the underlying issue the episode raises has not been publicly confirmed as resolved.Here's what has changed after we first published: ahead of IPL 2025, JioHotstar partnered with Nielsen to introduce third-party verified ad measurement for the first time in Indian OTT. It was a direct response to the advertiser pressure this episode describes. But the Nielsen study that followed measured cross-screen duplication: whether the same viewer was being counted differently across TV, mobile, and connected TV. It didn't address the specific complaint HUL raised, which was about a single user being shown the same ad repeatedly within one platform. JioStar has not publicly confirmed that the problem has been fixed.What has changed though, for IPL 2026: connected TV ad rates are up 25%, with the base cost of a 10-second ad rising from ₹480 to ₹600 CPM. The money is bigger. And the question of whether advertisers are getting what they pay for remains the same.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.

Investors are calling India's home-services market quick commerce's next big moment. Instahelp, Snabbit, and Pronto are betting big on it. They're sending trained workers to your door in under 10 minutes, at prices cheaper than a coffee. Orders, naturally, are in the millions.But the difference is that quick commerce eventually figured out how to make money. Here, on the other hand, 82% of consumers have already said they won't pay more than Rs 200 an hour. And on every order placed today, the market leader is losing twice what it earns.So who exactly is this boom working for?Tune in.

Diet Coke disappeared from Bangalore's shelves, and a teenager's frustrated Reddit post accidentally explained why: the Strait of Hormuz.When the US-Israel war on Iran began in February, fuel shipments slowed. Aluminium furnaces went cold. PET resin prices jumped 75%. At least 25 plants shut completely. In one Odisha industrial belt alone, 700 of 1,500 workers lost their jobs.But the war only made an existing problem worse — India had already tightened import rules on aluminium cans, leaving beverage companies dangerously dependent on West Asian buffer stock.The shortage was always coming. The war just decided that it was now.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.

Last week, Rihanna was all over our social media feeds as she flew to Mumbai for the official India launch of Fenty Beauty. Now it is exclusively available through Reliance Retail's beauty company, Tira. This was the popstar's second visit to India in two years; the first being a private performance at Anant Ambani's pre-wedding celebrations in 2024, her first paid show in eight years. For a woman who built her entire brand on never showing up on anyone else's terms, there's something worth examining here. Fenty is valued at nearly $3 billion and India's premium beauty market is heading towards $4 billion by 2035. But the real story starts in November 2023, when Reliance spent ₹99 crore acquiring Sephora India.In this episode, host Snigdha Sharma examines if any of this was really Rihanna's choice.Tune inDaybreak 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.

At Kochi's Infopark, two models of the IT industry sit 500 metres apart. Infosys and Wipro: sprawling campuses, thousands of engineers, margins built on scale. IBM: a smaller hub, senior-heavy teams, focused on enterprise AI. Same city, completely different bets on the future.India's IT giants are expanding into tier-2 cities because they're cheaper. But AI is quietly making the old logic — hire more, deliver at scale — look like the wrong answer. Infosys and Wipro's stocks have nearly halved since 2021. IBM's has doubled.So what does Kochi reveal about where Indian IT is actually headed?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.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.

You pick up an unknown number. A bubbly voice starts selling you a credit card. You hang up in seconds. Except now, that voice may not be human.AI voice agents are already live across banks, e-commerce and healthcare platforms in India, with startups in the space raising over Rs 280 crore. But behind that perfectly polite pitch is a more complex rollout — from pilots and script tuning to adapting across languages and dialects.So, what's driving this sudden funding spree, and how are companies actually deploying these AI callers in India?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.

A study gave 16 experienced developers the best AI coding tools available.They predicted they'd be 24% faster. They felt 20% faster. They were actually 19% slower — and still didn't believe it when told.That gap between belief and reality is now being deployed at enterprise scale.TCS, Infosys, Wipro, and Cognizant have committed to over 50,000 AI coding licences each. Bugs per developer are up 50%. Code is reaching production without any human review.And the senior engineers who could catch the mistakes are buried too deep in the flood to look up.Is India's IT sector selling a productivity story it hasn't actually earned yet?Tune in. *With inputs from Mrunmayee Kulkarni. Read her piece here: Engineers gag as Amazon, TCS, and Cognizant ram ‘mandatory AI' into everyday workRead the NYT article: The Big Bang: A.I. Has Created a Code OverloadRead Luciano Nooijen's blog post: Why I stopped using AI code editorsDaybreak 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 years ago, Reliance Industries made a promise that was supposed to change India's energy future. It didn't. Today, with a war raging in the Middle East, the Strait of Hormuz mostly closed, and Qatar — India's single largest gas supplier — unable to guarantee supplies, that broken promise has become a full-blown crisis. India finds itself caught between Trump, Tehran, and its own structural failures. The IEA calls it the worst energy crisis in history. For India, it may be the moment that finally forces a 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.

When your SIP bounces, your bank charges you Rs 500. The mutual fund that missed the investment? Charges you nothing. That gap is not an accident.In this piece, The Ken's Mutasim Khan traces how India's banks have quietly turned missed SIP debits into a revenue line — one that costs them roughly Rs 25 to process, and nets them hundreds of crores a month. The people paying most are first-time investors in smaller cities, often unaware the charge even happened.This is a read aloud of Mutasim's original story, by Snigdha Sharma, on Daybreak.

India's life expectancy has doubled since 1950. But 65% of deaths are still from diseases caught too late. Cent, the new startup from Practo's founder, thinks it has an answer: full-body AI scans that find risks before they become diagnoses. At Rs 20,000–30,000 a scan, it's already found critical findings in hundreds of patients — with zero false positives, it claims.But Cent doesn't diagnose. It doesn't refer. And it has no proprietary technology. So what exactly are you paying for — and what happens after it finds something?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 has spent years building a reputation as the AI company that actually cares about safety. Then, in the span of two weeks, it leaked an unannounced model, exposed its own source code, and accidentally handed hackers a blueprint of its most widely-used product. The fix came in 24 hours. The blueprint can't be unlearned. And the companies that trusted Claude Code with their deepest systems are still running on publicly documented defences. If the most careful AI company couldn't prevent this, what does that mean for everyone else?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 approved a ₹41,534 crore fertiliser subsidy for the upcoming kharif season last week, a 12% increase from last year. The move comes as the Gulf War has severely disrupted India's fertiliser supply chains, with urea prices jumping 65% in just 40 days. India is the world's second largest fertiliser importer, and the Strait of Hormuz carries a significant share of both the finished fertilisers and the gas needed to make them domestically. The kharif season, which produces roughly 100 million tonnes of rice, begins in June. In this episode, host Snigdha Sharma looks at India's fertiliser subsidy policy and what its really doing for farmers during this crisis. 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 building data centres at unprecedented speed to support cloud services, AI, and digital growth. At the same time, cities across the country are struggling with water shortages and repeated contamination of drinking-water supplies.A United Nations report describes this condition as water bankruptcy. It is the stage where water systems continue to function, but only by drawing down reserves that cannot recover fast enough.In this episode, host Snigdha Sharma looks at how India's data centre push fits into that reality, drawing lessons from cities abroad where similar tensions have already surfaced.So as India builds for a digital future, the question is simple: who decides how much water that future can afford?**This episode was originally published on 22 Jan, 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.