Daybreak

“Don’t travel by air.” That was a Supreme Court judge’s response on Monday, when a petitioner asked for an urgent cap on airfares before Diwali, Bhai Dooj and Chhath. Airlines blame jet fuel, and they have a point. Jet fuel in Delhi costs about 46% more than it did a year ago, and fuel now makes up nearly 40% of IndiGo’s costs.  But fuel alone can’t explain a ticket that costs four times the usual...

At India's premier engineering schools, the humanities and social sciences or HSS have become a put-down. "Oh, you're being so HSS" is what students say to anyone seen as too "woke". This tension has now surfaced again at IIT Bombay where the protests following the passing away of student Sahil Wakode, were largely lead by humanities doctoral students. Engineers describe a "hyper-apolitical" campu...

India’s homes cost 11 times annual income, more than double the affordability benchmark, and real wages fell 4% between 2012 and 2024. For Gen Z, buying a house on a salary alone barely adds up. Inheritance is filling some of the gap, with gift deed registrations rising sharply in Mumbai, Pune and Delhi. But family property often comes late, comes split, or comes with conditions. What happens to t...

For years, Vodafone Idea (Vi) kept losing subscribers. Since February, that’s stopped, and the company is now pushing hard with unlimited data, family plans and stacked offers, even roping in Shah Rukh Khan. Its losses are shrinking, AGR dues are falling and margins are at a decade high. But Airtel and Jio are still growing far faster, and Vi’s market share keeps slipping. In this episode, we look...

Netflix paid 175 crore for the Hindi version of a single blockbuster. For a season of Roadies, the college-favourite reality show, it reportedly paid 18 and even agreed to share it with rival JioHotstar, something you wouldn't expect a platform built on exclusivity to do. Today, on our first video episode of Daybreak, we look at the platform that made its name on shows like Sacred Games and Lust S...

Getting into a top American university has become a mountain of research papers, social projects and competitions. And wealthy Indian families are now starting the climb when kids are 14. In this episode, host Rachel Varghese reads out Vishnu Prakash's piece from The Ken's newsletter, Make India Competitive Again: "How to 'manufacture' an Ivy League applicant". It looks at why premium consultancie...

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 a lack of accessibility for regional content, many of those viewers have turned to less legal options. One of them is an unlicensed box that can cost as little $10 a month, and come...

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 consum...

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 mainly when they take money out as cash, and sometimes when they send it. In markets where most adults have no bank account, those fees add up.  Bharti Airtel's Indian business, Air...

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 than just Jio, and not every member of the conglomerate is getting attention. Take Ajio, which is heading into the competition of festive season with falling traffic, trimmed marketing a...

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 their responses through a Bayesian model, and compares the results with patient history to assign a score. The co-founder eventually plans to have just 15 dogs screen 2,50,000 patient...

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 with public money, largely through LIC. Now LIC stands to get back roughly what it put in. The government and LIC who will now hold roughly a third are set to hand over management cont...

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 to start on October 15.  Two days before that, NPCI, the body that runs UPI, put it on hold until after Diwali. On this episode, we look at what the fee is, where the money would go,...

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 largest private port operator has quietly built a fleet of more than a hundred vessels across 12 countries. Their job is servicing the world’s offshore energy infrastructure. The business...

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 troubl...

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 under attack and startups struggling to justify their valuations, to the rules regulators are rewriting, AI’s impact on jobs, and how Indians are changing the way they live, we explore...

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...

“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 September, the last 31 stores shut. In its last full financial year, the chain lost nearly ₹90 crore on just ₹92 crore of revenue.  Nobody has said why the stores are closing. But this is a...

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,...

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 Bengaluru called Neuralgarage says it has a fix. It's AI solution changes a line according to the way in which actor's lips move. In this piece, Shiveka Bakshi looks at how it works, why we...

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.  T...

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 fo...

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...

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...

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...