Afleveringen
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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 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.
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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.
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Zijn er afleveringen die ontbreken?
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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