Daybreak

Jio Studios is now the largest production house in India by revenue, catalogue, and box-office share. It got there fast. Stree 2, Laapataa Ladies, Dhurandhar, all Jio. The Dhurandhar franchise alone is closing in on Rs 3,000 crore worldwide. Meanwhile, Dharma, Excel, Maddock, and Bhansali have all sold significant stakes just to stay in the game. Jio simply does not need to. It has Reliance's tele...

Gen Z was supposed to be AI's most enthusiastic adopters. For a while, they were. Then the hiring froze, the jobs disappeared, and the tools got good enough to make the question uncomfortably personal. Excitement about AI among Gen Z is down 15% since last year. Anger is up 9%. But the more interesting story isn't the sentiment shift — it's what's happening underneath it. Writing skills degrading...

Air India’s board met in Mumbai last week to discuss cost cuts, CEO succession, and whether to start charging business class passengers separately for meals and lounge access. The airline is projecting losses exceeding ₹22,000 crore for the financial year just ended, nearly double the year before. Campbell Wilson is stepping down as CEO. International flights are being cut by over 20%. Jet fuel co...

On a Wednesday morning in April, The Ken's Mrunmayee Kulkarni went to Rushikonda beach in Visakhapatnam looking for a manhole. She found it — a concrete chamber with a reinforced lid, no armed guard, no exclusion zone, no legal protection. In a few years, it will be one of the landing points for the world's longest undersea cable. 95% of India's internet — every payment, every message, a $341 bill...

India's carmakers are staring down a deadline.  In less than a year, new emission norms will require them to dramatically cut their carbon output — or pay hundreds of millions of dollars in fines. Electric vehicles were supposed to be the answer. But the batteries aren't ready, the infrastructure isn't there, and adoption has been slower than anyone predicted. So the industry has quietly pivoted t...

India's best AI models are confidently wrong. Not occasionally — structurally. If you put two unrelated ideas into a prompt, the model will usually invent a connection rather than admit that none exists. In this piece, The Ken's Debanjali Biswas traces what a five-month study of leading AI models — from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google — actually found about how they reason. The results landed almost...

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 time in history. Months later, Adani floated a new subsidiary to enter the same field. The think tank is called Chintan Research Foundation. It started in a South Delhi cafe. It calls i...

The Parle-G packet has cost five rupees since the 1990s. Once, when the company tried raising it by 50 paise, consumers switched to Britannia's Tiger within weeks. The price was rolled back. That's how sensitive this market is. But something else has been changing — quietly, and without announcement. The packet that was once 100 grams is now 45. And Parle-G isn't alone. Dabur, Britannia, Nestlé, G...

West Bengal and Tamil Nadu declared their results yesterday. BJP swept Bengal after fifteen years of TMC rule. In Tamil Nadu, Vijay's TVK won, upending the DMK return almost everyone had predicted, including the platforms that had money on it. Prediction markets are now a $150 billion industry. And they were taking live bets on India's assembly elections, on a platform India officially banned last...

Market shocks hit retirees harder than anyone else. For those just retired or on the verge of it, a sharp early drop in portfolio value can cause damage that compounds quietly over decades, long after markets recover. The American war in Iran is the latest trigger. And it may not be the last. The good news: careful planning can offset the risk. A concept called the safe withdrawal rate, used corre...

In November 2024, one of India's biggest FMCG companies, Hindustan Unilever, started getting a barrage of complaints from its consumers, who said they were seeing the same Dove and Surf Excel ads repeatedly on OTT platforms during a single watch session. Some of them were shown the same ads as many as 150 times within a week. With IPL around the corner, HUL — which spends nearly Rs 4,000 crore on...

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...

Diet Coke disappeared from Bangalore's shelves, and a teenager's frustrated Reddit post accidentally explained why: the Strait of Hormuz. When the US-Israel war on Iran began in February, fuel shipments slowed. Aluminium furnaces went cold. PET resin prices jumped 75%. At least 25 plants shut completely. In one Odisha industrial belt alone, 700 of 1,500 workers lost their jobs. But the war only ma...

Last week, Rihanna was all over our social media feeds as she flew to Mumbai for the official India launch of Fenty Beauty. Now it is exclusively available through Reliance Retail's beauty company, Tira. This was the popstar's second visit to India in two years; the first being a private performance at Anant Ambani's pre-wedding celebrations in 2024, her first paid show in eight years. For a woman...

At Kochi's Infopark, two models of the IT industry sit 500 metres apart.  Infosys and Wipro: sprawling campuses, thousands of engineers, margins built on scale.  IBM: a smaller hub, senior-heavy teams, focused on enterprise AI. Same city, completely different bets on the future. India's IT giants are expanding into tier-2 cities because they're cheaper.  But AI is quietly making the old logic — hi...

Lightrock arrived in India with nearly a billion dollars and royal backing — the Liechtenstein dynasty's centuries-old fortune funding bets on around 40 growth-stage startups. The firm moved fast, doubled down on existing investments more aggressively than most peers, and scaled hard during the zero-interest-rate boom. Then the cycle turned. Its portfolio — Waycool, Pharmeasy, Dunzo — ran into tro...

You pick up an unknown number. A bubbly voice starts selling you a credit card. You hang up in seconds.  Except now, that voice may not be human. AI voice agents are already live across banks, e-commerce and healthcare platforms in India, with startups in the space raising over Rs 280 crore. But behind that perfectly polite pitch is a more complex rollout — from pilots and script tuning to adaptin...

A study gave 16 experienced developers the best AI coding tools available. They predicted they'd be 24% faster. They felt 20% faster. They were actually 19% slower — and still didn't believe it when told. That gap between belief and reality is now being deployed at enterprise scale. TCS, Infosys, Wipro, and Cognizant have committed to over 50,000 AI coding licences each. Bugs per developer are up...

Seventeen years ago, Reliance Industries made a promise that was supposed to change India's energy future. It didn't. Today, with a war raging in the Middle East, the Strait of Hormuz mostly closed, and Qatar — India's single largest gas supplier — unable to guarantee supplies, that broken promise has become a full-blown crisis. India finds itself caught between Trump, Tehran, and its own structur...

When your SIP bounces, your bank charges you Rs 500. The mutual fund that missed the investment? Charges you nothing. That gap is not an accident. In this piece, The Ken's Mutasim Khan traces how India's banks have quietly turned missed SIP debits into a revenue line — one that costs them roughly Rs 25 to process, and nets them hundreds of crores a month. The people paying most are first-time inve...

India's life expectancy has doubled since 1950. But 65% of deaths are still from diseases caught too late. Cent, the new startup from Practo's founder, thinks it has an answer: full-body AI scans that find risks before they become diagnoses. At Rs 20,000–30,000 a scan, it's already found critical findings in hundreds of patients — with zero false positives, it claims. But Cent doesn't diagnose. It...

Anthropic has spent years building a reputation as the AI company that actually cares about safety. Then, in the span of two weeks, it leaked an unannounced model, exposed its own source code, and accidentally handed hackers a blueprint of its most widely-used product. The fix came in 24 hours. The blueprint can't be unlearned. And the companies that trusted Claude Code with their deepest systems...

The Indian government approved a ₹41,534 crore fertiliser subsidy for the upcoming kharif season last week, a 12% increase from last year. The move comes as the Gulf War has severely disrupted India's fertiliser supply chains, with urea prices jumping 65% in just 40 days. India is the world's second largest fertiliser importer, and the Strait of Hormuz carries a significant share of both the finis...

India is building data centres at unprecedented speed to support cloud services, AI, and digital growth. At the same time, cities across the country are struggling with water shortages and repeated contamination of drinking-water supplies. A United Nations report describes this condition as water bankruptcy. It is the stage where water systems continue to function, but only by drawing down reserve...

India's new undergraduate framework was supposed to fix a broken system — where only 8% of graduates land jobs that match their degrees. The fix? Give students hundreds of courses to choose from, blend formal education with vocational training, and make them more employable. But when every course carries the same two credits, students do the math quickly and the easier course wins. Now universitie...