Daybreak

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 fo...

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 consumer...

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...

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...

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 produc...

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...

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 fa...

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 ar...

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 th...

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...

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...

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, callin...

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 nothi...

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 firs...

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 fol...

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 reaso...

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 re...

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 c...

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 e...

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...

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 cou...

Assam is enduring some of its worst flooding in years, with the death toll inching to a hundred and lakhs affected. It is also happens to be the state that recently landed India's first chip assembly plant, a ₹27,000 crore Tata facility, and the centrepiece of Japan's growing push into the Northeast. The plant itself is light on water. But the deeper ecosystem Assam is chasing, chemicals and the r...

Last Tuesday, Trump announced 100% tariffs on generic medicines imported into the US. By Wednesday, Indian pharma stocks were already falling even though the tariff doesn't take effect for two years. Trump wants import companies to reshore their manufacturing to the US so that the country can secure life-saving medication in the event of global supply chain disruptions. India supplies nearly 50% o...

Burger King India is one of the country's better-run quick-service chains. Gross margins are at record highs, restaurant-level profits have doubled, and the burger chain has posted five straight quarters of same-store-sales growth. So why does its stock sit close to where it listed six years ago? Part of the answer is Indonesia, where an old acquisition keeps bleeding cash. The rest is the new own...

When Accenture employees in Pune walked into their appraisal meetings in May, they expected the routine conversations. Instead, they found out things would be done differently this year. They did get their full salary hike. But not the way it was done up until now. Half went into the base salary. The other half arrived as a lump sum in June. On paper, nothing was lost. In practice, though, every f...