Daybreak
The Ken
300 episodes
Business news is complex and overwhelming. It doesn’t have to be. Every day of the week, from Monday to Friday, Daybreak tells one business story that’s significant, simple and powerful.
More about the show
Hosted from The Ken’s newsroom by Snigdha Sharma and Rachel Varghese, Daybreak relies on years of original reporting and analysis by some of India’s most experienced and talented business journalists.
Episodes page 1 of 6
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JioHotstar’s real overseas rival is a $10 per month pirate box
JioStar has taken JioHotstar to the UK, Canada, Singapore and the Middle East. It's chasing roughly 37 million Indians living abroad, and their taste for content from back home. But frustrated by geolocked content and…
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India's instant home help boom has a pricing problem
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…
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Without a UPI, Africa pays a toll on cash. Airtel Money collects it
Airtel Money is now trading in London, valued at about $7 billion. The African mobile-money company made $373 million in profit last financial year. It is based on a simple model. Depositing cash is free. Customers pay…
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Ajio wants to course-correct, but Reliance Retail’s shadow looms large
Reliance has a lot to celebrate. The bidding for Jio IPO closed on Friday, more than 20 times subscribed, and with India's biggest valuation ever; the shares will list on Wednesday. But the Ambani empire is bigger…
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Dogs have a nose for cancer. An Indian startup is betting on them
Less than 1% of Indians get tested for cancer, and with full body scans costing as much as Rs 25,000, it's not surprising. Dognosis, a Bengaluru startup, has a solution. It trains dogs to sniff out cancer early, runs…
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India’s largest financial-sector FDI is coming. But what does the public get?
On 14 October, the Cabinet approved selling nearly 61% of IDBI Bank to the Canadian firm Fairfax for nearly ₹53,000 crore. Once completed, it will be the largest FDI in India’s financial sector. But IDBI was rescued…
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Why your Diwali shopping is more important than MDR on UPI
Around mid-September, shops in parts of Ghaziabad started putting up signs: carry cash, because UPI wouldn’t be accepted. They were protesting a new 0.4% merchant fee on UPI payments above 2,000 rupees, which was due…
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After making a fortune at the dock, Adani's next bet is a fleet of 100 ships going offshore
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…
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Air India needs saving. Singapore Airlines is playing saviour
Air India's recent losses nearly doubled to 22,000 cr rs, and Tata Sons chairman N Chandrasekaran keeps showing up at its Delhi Headquarters. Singapore Airlines, which owns over 25%, is inclined to put in more cash,…
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What happens when you put Indian business on a 2x2?
In this Daybreak x Two by Two crossover, host Snigdha Sharna turns the tables on Praveen Gopal Krishnan to look beyond individual companies and industries, and at the bigger patterns connecting them. From duopolies…
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India’s food inflation has layers. The onion is only the first
On October 12, government data showed India’s food inflation rose to 7.7% in September, led by onion prices that more than doubled from a year earlier. Back in May, onion growers in Nashik wore garlands of onions and…
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7-Eleven promised "Everything essential". It still lost to India's corner shops
“Mile har cheez zaruri.” Everything essential, right here. That was the promise on the signs inside India’s first 7-Eleven, which opened in Mumbai five years ago, with India’s biggest retailer behind it. This…
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Karnataka can’t fix its potholes. So it’s building an AI city
Every morning, a senior official in Mysuru’s city corporation swerves past the same potholes on his way to the office responsible for fixing them. Over three years, the money Mysuru gets from the state for everyday…
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Bollywood wants to offend nobody. AI is happy to help
In India, even the phantom of the censor board is enough to make filmmakers rewrite scenese at the very last minute, including those making shows for streaming platforms the board doesn't cover. A startup from…
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Why your next IIT, IIM reunion will feel like a sales pitch
What happens when India's top institutes start treating reunions as fundraisers? The Ken's Santhom and Mutasim, both from IITs themselves, write about how one batch of alumni pledged Rs. 100 crores for a single idea,…
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Apple and Google's app stores are the next battleground for protests
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…
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Nike needs India’s sneaker heads. But do they need Nike?
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…
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Delhi built a ‘safe’ surveillance city. It can now locate anyone in seconds
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…
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How Flipkart Minutes became the company's redemption arc
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.…
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Adani’s think tank flexes its muscles in Delhi
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…
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India is burning through its coal buffer
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…
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Ekta Kapoor built her own OTT app. Now she's betting on YouTube
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…
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Can India build a ‘UPI’ for your cows and your gold?
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…
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AI is Bollywood's cheapest new hire
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…
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UPI is the trojan horse taking small banks into HDFC, Axis's credit-card empire
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.…
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How India's rich are finding returns in the country's court backlog
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…
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Amazon’s quick-commerce win will be less about speed and more about Prime
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,…
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One year of GST 2.0. Who's it working for?
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…
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A cancelled peptide party, and the questions it raised that Indian sellers still can't answer
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…
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Why Indigo went budget and premium at once
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…
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India's newest iPhone prices hurt the people selling them, buying them and even taxing them
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…
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7.8% growth. So why doesn't India feel richer?
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…
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Your kids might be looting your bank account in the guise of gaming
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…
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India's data law has HDFC Bank, Amazon, Paytm, and others shopping for consent
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…
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This week in AI: activist robots, doom-laden researchers — so who's the good guy?
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…
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India has more tourists than ever. So why is tourism in trouble?
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…
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The Government sold Air India to escape its problems. The fix is to buy back in
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…
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Nykaa cracked fashion at last. Myntra sees no reason to panic
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…
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Rapido broke the ride-hailing duopoly. Now it's coming for Zomato and Swiggy
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…
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India's call centres are using AI to make agents sound American
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…
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Meta's $18 billion child-safety settlement has India looking for the wrong answer
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…
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India got cheap Ozempic. No one knows how to sell it
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.…
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A worker-owned Uber is India's fix for its ever-expanding gig workforce
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…
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The best savings product your bank offers is the one it advertises less
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…
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The great Indian sugar trap: how a decade of surplus left India with nothing to spare
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…
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Welcome to the 'brain gym': DIY neurotech is now in India, no prescription required
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…
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Banks are being asked to become “cool” for Gen Z. Their problem isn't branding
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…
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Ten minutes to your door, no minutes to clean
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…
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India trains more ethical hackers than anywhere else. It just can't give them a reason to stay
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…
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India's $60 billion data-center bet, and the jobs it won't actually create
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…
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