Daybreak

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, but in return, it wants more control over operations, costs, safety and training. And it's already changing the way pilots, engineers and cabin crew work. Meanwhile, Air India's troubles lie somewhat out of its hands. Pakistan's airspace closure hit it the hardest, and compounding its now longer routes for certain flights are soaring fuel prices. There's also delayed deliveries of new aircrafts. And of course, the reputational damage from 2025 Ahmedabad crash. Singapore Airlines' is definitely the best chance for the company's turnaround.Tune in. Listen: The Government sold Air India to escape its problems. The fix is to buy back inThis episode is edited by Arnav PrakashDaybreak 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 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 tried to block the Mumbai–Agra highway because prices had fallen to ₹4 to ₹6 a kilo. The government says India grew almost as many onions as the year before, and it kept a stockpile for exactly this kind of spike. Prices rose anyway, and rural households are feeling it most. Why is it so hard to keep India’s kitchen affordable?Tune in.India’s LPG success story runs on a two-day buffer, March 15, 2026, 11 minutes. ListenIndia solved the wrong oil problem first, 31 Jul 2026, ListenThe great Indian sugar trap: how a decade of surplus left India with nothing to spare , 28 Aug 2026, ListenThis episode is edited by Arnav PrakashDaybreak 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 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 civic upkeep has fallen from Rs 25 crore to Rs 3 crore, leaving little for repairs.Just outside Bengaluru, Karnataka is borrowing heavily to build an Rs 18,000-crore AI city in Bidadi, backed by a state guarantee, before a single company has signed up to move in. Telangana and Andhra Pradesh are chasing similar projects as their own local bodies struggle for funds.In this read aloud of Mrunmayee Kulkarni’s newsletter edition by host Snigdha Sharma, we ask why states are betting big on new cities when the ones people already live in are grappling with crumbling infrastructure and lack of funds.This episode is edited by Arnav PrakashDaybreak 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.

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, and look at the system growing around this kind of philanthropy like x-bankers that run development foundations, non-profit partners set in California taking donations in dollars. The result is that some alumni feel that donation floors are taking the sentiment out of reunions, making them feel less about the connection between students and campuses and more like manicured events. Host Rachel Varghese sits down with both reporters to explore what has changed with universities doubling down on this model, whether it will last and what both reporters are likely to do once their own 25th reunion comes around. Tune in.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 PrakashDaybreak 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.

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.

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.

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.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.

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.

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.

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.