Explorez tous les épisodes du podcast Daybreak

On October 3, Jack Dorsey's Bitchat disappeared from Apple's App Store in India after the IT ministry demanded its removal. It vanished from Google Play too. Bitchat lets phones pass messages over Bluetooth, with no internet needed. That made it a lifeline in July, when the government switched off mobile internet around Delhi's Jantar Mantar during student protests. In one week, India accounted for 85% of the app's global downloads. 

Even an order to pull its code off GitHub didn't stop it spreading. 

So the government went after the app stores. 

In this episode, host Snigdha Sharma looks at the technology protesters reach for when the internet goes dark, and how governments are learning to keep up.

Tune in.

Also listen to: 

Delhi built a ‘safe’ surveillance city. It can now locate anyone in seconds

This episode was edited by Arnav Prakash

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 the NBA complained about Micheal Jordan's black and red shoes, Nike turned the complaint into an ad, and sneakers ended up becoming a symbol of style and rebellion.

In India, sneaker culture took longer to arrive. But last year, more than 200 people lined up outside a store in Bangalore for a limited edition shoe from Comet, a homegrown brand.

And Nike could use that kind of enthusiasm right now. Its revenue fell 4% last quarter, and its losing ground in China, a major market, to local players. Which is why, its new Bangalore campus sounded like a bet on Indian sneaker heads. But other communications suggest that it's a "capability center", another back office, and this is after Nike has pulled away from India before. 

So, today we ask: is Nike fighting for the market that Comet, Gully Labs and Ten x You are carving out for themselves? And if it was, what would it take for it to win?

This episode was edited by Arnav Prakash

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 face caught on a camera, your vehicle number plate, a voter ID, a driving licence, even a police-clearance certificate—any of these can become part of a vast web of data that the police can search in Delhi.

That matters especially now, as the capital sees mass protests and public demonstrations, raising questions around safety. surveillance, privacy and the right to dissent.

The Ken's Pratap Vikram Singh spent a month investigating Delhi’s ₹857-crore Safe City Project, conceived in the name of women’s safety. Its mandate now extends far beyond that, to crime prevention, public-order surveillance and political and religious rallies.

What exactly is Delhi building, who can access it, and what happens when a system designed to find criminals can find almost anyone?

In this episode, host Snigdha Sharma reads Pratap’s report titled: Delhi’s mass surveillance: track 50 million faces, identify them in five seconds

This episode was edited by Arnav Prakash

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.

For years, Flipkart has tried and struggled to scale the vertical it began to sell groceries.

But as quick commerce platforms started becoming successful, the e-commerce giant could not just stay out of the game. Today, around a quarter of its business comes from Minutes. What is driving the vertical is also an aggressive expansion of dark stores and in tier-2 and a change in management affecting selection on the platform.

In this episode, we look at how Minutes has made it work so far, and why Flipkart's push into quick commerce is becoming a way for it to secure its future.

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 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 ( https://the-ken.com/podcasts/daybreak... )

*This episode was originally published on May 6th 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.

This September was supposed to give India's power grid a break. Instead, on some nights, the gap between the electricity people wanted and what the grid could supply reached almost 8 gigawatts, bigger than anything seen during this year's heatwaves. Kerala restricted power in the evenings. Near Patna, villagers blocked a highway after three days without electricity. And 82 power plants were running critically low on coal, with barely a week's worth left.

Strangely, India isn't short of coal. About 76 million tonnes sits at Coal India's mines. But a weak monsoon drained the dams and flooded the coal belt at the same time.

So how much breathing room is there between you and a power cut?

This episode was edited by Arnav Prakash.

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 the 2000s, Ekta Kapoor's serials ruled Indian TV every night on weekdays.

Then as, audiences moved from TV screens to smaller ones and streaming, her company, Balaji Telefilms followed. It bet on its own streaming app: ALTBalaji.

For years, it lost money. Until finally, it shut down last year after a government ban in 2025. Now, Balaji is taking 5 new shows and a combined 200 episodes to Youtube. Premium, shot in 4k and free to watch.

So why is India's queen of TV soaps, skipping the subscription model? We dig into her belief in an audience that no one is serving, the Pakistani drama effect and whether a bet on Youtube's ad model is enough for TV.

This episode was edited by Arnav Prakash.

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.

Earlier this month, at the Global Fintech Fest in Mumbai, India's regulators and industry leaders rallied around one idea: tokenisation, which turns assets like bonds, gold and land into digital units that can be bought, sold and settled in seconds. Some of it is already underway, with three companies recently raising over Rs 1,000 crore through bonds that settled the same day.

But the plan leans heavily on the RBI's digital rupee, which has seen little use four years after launch. And Indian banks have bet on blockchain before, without much to show for it.

In this edition, Suprita Anupam examines whether tokenisation can do for financial assets what UPI did for payments.

This is a read aloud of a newsletter edition of Ka Ching, by Snigdha Sharma on Daybreak by The Ken.

📖 Read the full story on The Ken: Can India build a ‘UPI’ for your cows and your gold?

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.

Bollywood has been seeing tough times since Covid.

Theatre footfall still haven't recovered, even as box office numbers soar, and budgets for filmmakers are only getting tighter.

AI seems to have a brought a glimmer hope for some in the industry, as it slowly makes its way into every stage of filmmaking. From identifying good concepts to writing scripts, storyboarding scenes, generating entire shots, to even replacing some VFX work.

Studio heads familiar with the space project shrinking crews and are already seeing timelines grow shorter. Still, it doesn't make the trade-off any less real.

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.

After two years of slow adoption, Credit-Line-on-UPI is finally taking off, but not with the big banks.

Small banks and fintechs are leading the charge, while the big incumbents that dominate credit cards hold back.

For HDFC and Axis, it's a really difficult choice. Should they compete on CLOU and risk cannibalising their own cards, or scale it through the very fintechs they're trying to outmatch?

Meanwhile, a matured tech stack has turned CLOU into a full-strength card equivalent, complete with real-time underwriting. And while CLOU had promised inclusion for those who can't normally access credit, the promised inclusion has actually been flipped.

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.

Make The Ken's Daybreak X First Principles Autumn Playlist here.

India has roughly 54 million cases stuck in its courts. Inside many of them is money someone is owed but can't afford to chase.

What if you could invest in that? Back the case, pay the legal bills, and take a cut if it wins. In the US and the UK, this is already a multi-billion-dollar asset class. In India, a handful of funders are trying to build it. But they've run into a strange problem. The same backlog that makes the idea so attractive is also what makes it so hard. Because here, of course you are betting on whether a case wins…but more importantly, you're betting on when.

In a recent edition of our weekly newsletter Ka Ching, The Ken reporter Mutasim Khan looked at who's making this bet, who's putting up the money, and who it's actually helping. 

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.

Make The Ken's Daybreak X First Principles Autumn Playlist here.

Amazon Now just crossed $1 billion in annualised gross sales, faster than Zepto did.

But it's still miles behind Blinkit, still losing money in India, and still playing catch-up on scale.

So why is its latest investment not focused on quick commerce?

Because for Amazon, the real fight isn't about who delivers fastest. It's about who can afford to lose money longer, and who has more to sell you than just groceries.

Today, host Rachel Varghese digs into Amazon's $300 million infrastructure bet, the food-safety raids exposing cracks in the dark-store model, and why Prime, and not 10-minute delivery, might be Amazon's actual edge heading into festive season.

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.

Tap here to help us make The Ken's  Daybreak X First principles Autumn Playlist

One year ago, GST 2.0 rewrote the tax on almost everything Indians buy — from soap to cars.

It promised a simpler system and cheaper shopping. 

Twelve months on, we ask the obvious question: is it working? 

Tune in.

India was about to have its first-ever peptide party with fifty guests, a mystery venue marketed only as "not a hospital," and a menu of collagen, glutathione, and copper peptides. Then the Karnataka Food Safety and Drug Administration started asking questions, and the party was cancelled overnight.

On this episode, The Ken's Sudeshna Ray joins host Rachel Varghese to unpack the peptide craze that's crossed over from Silicon Valley biohacking circles into Indian gyms, Instagram DMs, and D2C wellness brands, and the murky, largely unregulated supply chain, that runs through China, that gets these substances into the country in the first place.

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.

For two decades, an Indian air ticket told you what kind of airline you were flying. Low-cost meant cheap and bare. Full-service meant meals and baggage folded into the fare. That line is now almost gone. Indigo's new Lite fare strips economy down to a cabin bag, even as its Stretch cabin and BluChips programme reach for the premium flyer Air India once owned. 

Passengers are uneasy but investors, holding the only serious listed bet in Indian aviation, are not. 

What do Indigo's owners understand that its flyers do not

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.

Apple's newest iPhones landed in India with price hikes as high as 41%. And for the first time in years, there was no discount on older models to go along with it.

The memes pretty much came immediately. From selling kidneys to choosing between buying a phone or an Alto, a Royal Enfield or a vacation. People also couldn't help but notice that Apple's first foldable, the iPhone Duo, costs a lakh more in India than it does in the US.

But Apple is just a symptom of a larger problem. A global memory chip shortage is squeezing every phone maker and India's own tax structure is making it worse here than almost everywhere else. It's costing consumers, retailers and even the Government, which is slowly losing tax revenue to the grey market the price difference between India and elsewhere creates.

On this episode, host Rachel Varghese explores why India got hit the hardest and what happens when the workarounds like cheaper 4G phones, secondhand devices, and EMI, run out of road as well.

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 February this year, India announced a sweeping overhaul of how it calculates GDP, fixing a measurement system the IMF had flagged as outdated just last November. It includes a new base year, better price data, and a wider net to count the informal economy. The number seems to be getting closer to reality.

But that raises a harder question.

For a country that has built its global identity around being the world's fastest growing major economy, what happens when the arithmetic changes? And does any of it actually reach 1.4 billion people?

Host Snigdha Sharma explores.

Tune in.

(This episode is a re-run. It was originally published on 26 Feb, 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.

Kids all over India are spending real money inside mobile games. And most of the time, they slip by the notice of the adults, until the bill or bank alert eventually arrives.

Most of them are using their grandparent's or some other relative's phone, where UPI pins are usually already saved, and they're not watching so closely.

In fact, Delhi's cybercrime cell has seen a rise in "fraud" complaints that turn out to be a child spending small amounts repeatedly on loot boxes and in-game stores. India's gaming law banned real-money games because but loot boxes slipped through, because it doesn't immediately count as gambling. But loot boxes don't have set items. You could spend Rs. 75 to open a box with a skin that's worth thousands, and it can even be resold for real cash.

So, is it gambling, or not?

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 new data protection law is reshaping how companies talk to customers on WhatsApp. Messages that once felt routine now carry legal weight and are tied to consent, security, and user rights. Since the Digital Personal Data Protection Act became operational, businesses have begun reworking how they collect and manage personal data. That shift has created a fast-growing market for compliance tools, drawing startups and established firms into the same space.

As companies rush to avoid heavy penalties, disagreements are emerging over who should manage consent and how independent they need to be.

The bigger question is how much control users will really have over their data.

Tune in.

*This episode was first published on January 27th 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.

This week, a 27-year-old researcher quit Anthropic warning AI could "kill us all," and the company's own safety lead agreed.

Meanwhile, OpenAI says it cracked a 200-year-old math problem — then got accused of muscling a rival's name off the credit.

Also, the AI lab with a supposed conscience got caught building a watchlist of AI critics that files activism next to terrorism.

And in Poland's Warsaw, 30 robots staged a protest to regulate AI.

After all of this, who actually gets to be the good guy in the AI race?

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 foreign tourist arrivals slipped by about 8% from the year before to about 9 million in 2025, and a wave of recent reporting has finally made it a talking point. If you take out the business travellers and the diaspora visiting family, the number who came just to holiday in India may be closer to 3 million. 

And yet Indians have never travelled their own country more. Domestic trips have crossed 4 billion. The government is pouring thousands of crores into tourist circuits and temple towns like Varanasi and Ayodhya while spending almost nothing to bring foreigners in.

In this episode, host Snigdha Sharma asks who Indian tourism is really being built for now, and what India loses if the foreign visitor drops off the itinerary.

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 1967, Air India paid Salvador Dalí for a custom ashtray with a live baby elephant, flown all the way to Spain. (Yes, really! Here's the proof.)
 
That was the airline. Flush with money, just about 14 years  into nationalisation. 

Today, it's asking its owners for $1.5 billion after its biggest loss ever, at more than 2 billion dollars.

Privatisation was supposed to fix Air India. Three years on, it still hasn't. But the real story isn't a failed sale. It's a fatal crash, a closed airspace, and an industry that runs on razor-thin margins everywhere. But the actual fix might be closer than you think. And already sitting on Air India's own cap table.

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.

After years of struggling to grow, Nykaa Fashion has finally found its footing. The past year brought a real resurgence. For a long time, the platform bet on building its own private-label brands, even pushing hard into ethnic wear. It leaned on discounts and backed small, up-and-coming labels. None of it delivered the growth it was chasing. 

So Nykaa Fashion changed course. 

That new strategy is at last starting to show results. What turned it around, and how long can it last? 

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.

For over a year, India's restaurant association couldn't get Swiggy to return its calls. Then Rapido launched a food delivery app that charges restaurants zero commission — and Swiggy sent fifteen people to Bengaluru for an urgent meeting within days.

The restaurants have a real grievance. On Swiggy and Zomato, commissions, ads, and discounts can eat up nearly a third of every order. On Rapido's platform, restaurants keep almost all of it.

It's a good deal for restaurants. But even restaurant owners are wondering if it might be too good a deal to last.

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 you call an Indian call centre these days, the person answering might sound American — even if they've never left India. A new kind of AI can change an agent's accent in real time, mid-call, to sound more familiar to the customer. It's meant to build trust and cut hiring costs. 

But the same software that smooths out an accent often smooths away everything else too — laughter, tone, the small things that make a voice sound human. 

Some customers have started wondering if they're even talking to a real person. We dig into how this technology works, and what it costs the people whose voices are being rewritten.

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, Meta agreed to pay up to $18 billion to settle American lawsuits over how Instagram and Facebook treat children. The app will now be rebuilt around American teenagers, from a daily time limit to an overnight curfew. But none of it is coming to India, the single biggest market Meta has anywhere in the world.

So every op-ed page has been asking the obvious question. If Meta can protect a teenager in California, why should one in India wait? It sounds fair. But in this episode, host Snigdha Sharma argues the question is misdirected, and also that the fix we want to bring home would slip past the Indian child who needs it most.

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.

Ozempic went off-patent in India this year, and everyone from Novo Nordisk to Nestlé has rushed in expecting a billion-dollar market.

Instead, growth has already stalled, and the reason isn't price. It's culture.

While Hollywood joked about Ozempic on late-night TV and Serena Williams advertised a GLP-1 program for a tele-health platform at the Super Bowl, not a single Indian celebrity has admitted to using it.

We trace why the drug ran out of India's easiest customers within months, why its next move — into Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities — might not work either, and what it would actually take to sell a $200-a-month injection in a country that's only now starting to believe that obesity is a disease.

Read The Ken story about black market Ozempic 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.

Union Home and Cooperation Minister Amit Shah launched Bharat Taxi, a government-backed, driver-owned ride-hailing service built to take on private players like Ola and Uber. It runs as a cooperative so the drivers own it. And when it profits, they keep 80% of the money. Nearly 800,000 have already signed up. It is the government's boldest bid yet to pull gig workers out of a precarious market and hand them a stake in it.

There is just one problem.

No one in Indian ride-hailing has ever turned a profit. So what is a driver-owned cab service really for, if the payday it promises may never come?

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.

At least 44% of Indians have their money sitting in savings accounts. These accounts earn only about a fraction of what a fixed deposit pays. But even though FDs earn more, the payoff is that you have to lock away your money for longer, and pay a penalty if you break the account prematurely.

But did you know there's a product built to solve this exactly? It's called a Flexi-FD, and it promises FD-level returns with the liquidity that comes with savings accounts. Most banks offer it. And yet, not a lot of people have heard of it.

The Ken's Inderpal Singh gets into why banks aren't exactly rushing to popularise a product that's supposedly a win for depositors, and what "flexible" doesn't always mean in practice.

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 importing sugar for the first time in nearly a decade — a million tonnes, duty-free — to cool prices before the festive season. Four years ago, it exported a record 11 million tonnes.

Retail prices are up around 40% from last year. In Odisha, a kilo crossed ₹67. The government has capped stocks, halted exports and ordered mills to declare their sales.

Production came in about 11% below forecast, at 30.6 million tonnes.

The world's second-largest sugar producer just became an importer. How?

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.

For decades, sending an electric current into the brain meant a hospital, a doctor, and a diagnosis. A Bengaluru startup called Mave Health wants to move it into your daily routine. Its Rs 30,000 headset uses tDCS, a low current to the prefrontal cortex, to ease stress before it builds.

The technology is decades old and well-evidenced. What's new is who controls it. Mave sells directly to consumers, no prescription and no regulator sign-off, on the argument that it's simply a consumer electronic. The Ken reporter Sudeshna Ray wore one herself to find out how that feels.

Can medicine's oldest question: who gets to treat your brain, survive being sold like earphones?

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 finance minister wants public sector banks to get "cool" for Gen Z. With yoga vouchers, youth kiosks, awareness campaigns.

But the numbers tell a different story. PSBs are losing young Indians as both depositors and borrowers, while, at the same time, fintech lenders capture 57% of India's small-ticket loan market. Some, even at interest rates as high as 600%.

On this episode, host Rachel Varghese asks why India's public banks misdiagnosed the problem, what it's actually costing young borrowers, and whether the tools to fix it, like cheaper credit, and faster underwriting, that already exist can be pointed in this demographic's direction.

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.

Tukaram Mundhe, Maharashtra's food-safety chief, has gone viral this month for shutting famous restaurants and even noticing Shah Rukh Khan over an ad . Earlier this month his inspectors inspected around a dozen dark-store belonging to Blinkit, Zepto and Instamart. He isn't alone. On 22 August, a separate regulator in Telangana raided the dark stores behind grocery apps in Hyderabad, shutting four on the spot for expired stock and pests.

Everyone's cheering the crackdown. But it can't fix what it found. To deliver in ten minutes, a dark store packs a supermarket's worth of stock into a residential space, moving so fast that the work of keeping food safe keeps losing out. That's what the model produces when it runs as designed.

Quick commerce in India now runs on nearly 10 million orders a day. So why is there still no rule for the space your food waits in?

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 Nisarga Adhikary found critical flaws in CBSE's exam portal, the board denied it. So he broke back in, filmed it, and left anime videos running on their servers.

IIT Kanpur hired him the same week it launched India's first undergraduate cybersecurity degree — one that recruits through hackathons and sends students to work at government security agencies for two of the four years.

India produces a quarter of all researchers on global bug bounty platforms. The bounties come almost entirely from foreign companies. The RBI is now hiring cybersecurity talent on three-year contracts with no renewal path.

California is still winning.

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 Indian state wants to be the country's data-centre capital.

Gujarat, Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra. They're all handing out land, power, decades of tax breaks, all chasing the same promise: jobs.

The Ken reporters Inderpal Singh and Mrunmayee Kulkarni ran the numbers on what the jobs actually cost. And the math does not hold up.

On this episode of Daybreak, we go inside what's causing the data-centre boom. Why these buildings are designed to need almost no one, what states are actually betting on, and if the data-centre industry will see the same ecosystem build out as other sectors in India.

Take The Great Rewiring survey 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.

Tata 1mg just reported revenue of nearly 3,000 crore rupees for the last financial year, roughly ten times what it earned when Tata took control, and it is turning a profit while much of the sector bleeds cash.

In an e-pharmacy market obsessed with 10-minute delivery and deep discounts, 1mg won by doing the opposite. It capped its discounts and built its own labs and supply chain, and it treats fast delivery as a minor add-on.

In this episode, we unpack why patience beats blitzscaling in Indian healthcare and what 1mg means when it calls healthcare longitudinal.

Take The Great Rewiring survey 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.

China's microdrama industry took nearly eight years — and real government money — to reach the point where regulators had to step in over AI-flooded, quality-degraded content.

India's biggest platforms don't have eight years. They're building AI into production from day one, racing to scale catalogues before fatigue sets in.

Host Rachel Varghese, gets into why JioHotstar, ShareChat, and Kuku TV are pouring money into two-minute dramas, what a Chinese skincare brand's meteoric rise (and equally fast fall) reveals about the ceiling on this format, and whether India's shortcut to scale comes with a shortcut to burnout too.

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 built its IT industry on millions of coders doing exactly the work generative AI now does in seconds. So everyone knew who would feel the pressure first.

The data refuses to cooperate.

A survey of 1,552 tech professionals by the app Blind last week found the engineers, the ones everyone expects AI to replace, are the least worried of anyone surveyed. And an ICRIER study of 651 firms found the roles most exposed to AI, developers and analysts, are the ones firms want most.

Why does demand for technical workers persist as AI takes on more of their work?

Take The Great Rewiring survey 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.

An HSBC survey found that 86% of affluent Indian investors are now using AI in their trading. That's the highest share of any country surveyed, above China, Singapore, and the US. Nearly half say AI tools are their primary source of investment ideas.

Most of them are using the same two or three chatbots. And a growing body of academic research has found that when millions of investors ask the same models the same questions, they get the same answers — and pile into the same stocks at the same time.

And it's already creating an effect in some markets that experts call "predictable, and less efficient".

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 has been talking about drones a lot lately, from Operation Sindoor to the government's $2 billion plan for combat drones.

But long before that, in the forests of Chhattisgarh, security forces had already settled on the drone they trusted most. It is Chinese, made by a company called Da-Jiang Innovations, or DJI, and the government banned it years ago.

So why do India's soldiers keep reaching for it?

Based on investigation by Pratap Vikram Singh for The Ken

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.

Earlier this week, Anthropic began stamping an invisible watermark into the text and images Claude generates. The move came in order to comply with the EU AI Act but it will be switched on worldwide.

It is the thing teachers, editors, and hiring managers had been demanding for years — a way to finally tell human work from machine. Within hours, many people who pay for Claude were in revolt, calling it a scarlet letter on their own work.

But the mark barely does what either side thinks, right now. And the people it exposes are rarely the ones gaming the system.

So why do we keep asking to know what's AI, only to step back when the answer might be us?

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 Odyssey and Spider-Man: Brand New Day just broke India's box office records back to back — and PVR Inox's stock jumped almost 20% in the process. It looks like proof that Indian audiences are finally back in theatres. But that's not all.

The real story runs through just 34 IMAX screens, a decade-old trade deal that quietly expired, and a geopolitical rift thousands of miles away that has nothing to do with India at all.

Today on Daybreak, we look at how a nationwide screen shortage — something that should have hurt business — became PVR Inox's most profitable weapon, why Hollywood needs India more than ever, and why your next movie ticket could go either way depending on where you live.

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 platforms like Cred, Zerodha, and Groww integrating AI assistants, to Sebi-registered advisors now using AI to generate personalised investment recommendations, the shift is already underway.

And with nearly 140 million investors and fewer than a thousand registered advisors to serve them, the math alone might make AI advice not just convenient, but necessary.

Tune in.

**This episode was first published on 26 March, 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.

On a hot Thursday evening in Delhi, people are queuing outside India's first Olive Garden. Some found it on Instagram. Others wandered over from the business park next door. Almost all have waited at least half an hour.

Bharti Group wants 10 Olive Gardens in three years, and 125 total restaurants — more than double what it runs today. Indians are dining out more than ever, and serious money is following.

But the most successful restaurants in India have deliberately stayed small. The ones that tried to scale mostly didn't. And Bharti's confidence rests entirely on a simple observation: that Indians are dining out more than they ever were.

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.

Six months on, the answer has shifted. A US-Israeli war against Iran hit an already fragile stock market. Gold cooled, silver crashed, and real estate stayed flat, pushing investors toward fixed income for want of better returns. 

So we put the same question to the same five experts, four Sebi-registered advisers and a private wealth manager. Their consensus on diversification holds, but the reasons behind it have hardened.

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.

If you Google "paisa de do", dozens of near-identical websites appear. Some, offering cash in 15 minutes. The interest rate on some of these loans is 600% per annum and the lenders are RBI-licensed.

One borrower started with a Rs 75,000 loan. Within five months, he was paying Rs 6 lakh a month across eight different loan apps just to stay afloat.

The Ken's Mutasim Khan found 25 such NBFCs, some reporting revenue growth of 3,000 times in a single year. In 2024, the RBI flagged 45% annual interest as predatory. These lenders charge more than ten times that. And nobody has stopped them 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.

Zepto nearly doubled its revenue in a year, processes more orders than Swiggy Instamart, and has raised over 2.5 billion dollars from private investors. 

But when it filed to go public, India's largest mutual funds said they'd value it at less than half of what private investors had in it's last fundraise.

The IPO is now delayed by two quarters. The cash reserves are falling. And six players are competing in a quick commerce market that analysts say can only sustain a few.

Zepto's growth story has always worked in its favour but the public market is asking different questions.

Read Suprita's stories here:

• Zepto wants Rs 8,100 crore—and investors to trust the numbers it won’t disclose
• Zepto to recruits from rivals: We give you ‘generational wealth’, you give us long hours

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.

For generations, Indian families have shared the financial responsibility of ageing. Parents invested in their children through education, weddings and first homes, often expecting that support to come full circle in later life.

But the economics behind that arrangement are changing. India is ageing rapidly but also living longer. The number of people over 60 expected to more than double by 2050 even as formal retirement coverage reaches only a fraction of the workforce. Meanwhile, it is taking longer for younger working Indians to become financially secure which in turn is affecting their savings.

As these two trends collide, can India's oldest retirement model keep 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.

Amit was a computer science student who used to have a loan, a plan, and a flight to Canada. But then the college his visa depended on was derecognised. And an NBFC called Credila ended up with a Rs 20 lakh problem.

Amit's story is becoming an industry pattern. Canada has cut active student volume by over 50%. The US and UK are tightening too. Study-abroad applications are down 25 to 30%, and the NBFCs that built their entire business on overseas education loans — with 80 to 92% of their books concentrated there — are quietly shelving IPO plans and pivoting to domestic lending.

And the domestic market defaults at twenty times the rate. 

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 the world's top sunflower oil buyer, and Black Sea attacks have sent it hunting across South America. Shipments from Russia and Ukraine are running weeks late, and prices are climbing.

The substitutes are squeezed too. Indonesia is diverting more palm oil into biodiesel, and China's record soybean buying keeps the soy complex tight. A weak monsoon has thinned India's harvest. 

But the country has two oil problems, the crude it burns for fuel and the cooking oil it imports for the kitchen. It threw its capital at the fuel one first, reaching 20% ethanol blending years ahead of target. But feeding those distilleries takes land, and some of that land is coming from oilseeds. So the fix for one oil may gradually worsen the other.

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.