Daybreak

At a fintech conference in February, Razorpay showed a demo.  A user ordered food on Zomato by voice and paid — without opening a checkout page or a UPI app. No friction and no redirects. Just a job done end-from-end. The same week, OpenAI quietly rolled back its own in-chat shopping agent. Razorpay is calling this the biggest disruption to payments since UPI. But agentic commerce raises questions...

A cartoon reposted. An account restricted. A takedown notice with no warning and no appeal. India's new IT rules give platforms three hours to remove flagged content — the shortest window anywhere in the world. But a draft amendment published last month could go even further, potentially treating anyone who posts about current affairs as a publisher. Without the protections that come with it. For...

India's civil aviation ministry issued two directives this March that pulled in opposite directions. First, it mandated full refunds for cancelled flights. Three days later, it removed all caps on airfares. The trigger for the second move: the US-Israeli war against Iran has sent jet fuel prices soaring, up nearly 60% in the US, and India is bracing for the impact. Airlines, already running on thi...

India wants to design its own semiconductor chips. To help, the government launched a scheme with money and tools for startups that do exactly that.  But there's a catch — and it's keeping out the very people best placed to build this industry.  The engineers who spent decades in Silicon Valley, built the chips inside your devices, and are now coming home. A regulator that's also a competitor. And...

Imagine paying insurance premiums for years and then one day you actually need it. You're in a hospital, or someone you love is. And the insurer says: no. In the last financial year, Indian health insurers rejected claims worth ₹30,000 crore. Nearly one in eight claims were denied or left pending. And what's wild is how far back the problem starts. There are agents filling out forms incorrectly to...

Polymarket and Kalshi are two New York-founded prediction market platforms now valued in the billions. While both let users bet real money on elections and political events in real time, it is Polymarket — the larger, offshore, largely unregulated one — where someone made nearly a million dollars predicting US military strikes on Iran before they happened. Together, the two platforms processed ove...

For a decade, digital advertising ran on one idea: get to the top of Google. Buy the keywords and earn the clicks. That was the game. But AI just changed the rules. ChatGPT and Gemini now have over a billion and a half users between them, growing at nearly 200% year on year. People have stopped searching for links. Instead,nthey're asking questions and expecting answers. And those answers mention...

In 1965, Yoko Ono sat on a stage at Carnegie Hall and handed a pair of scissors to strangers. What they did next was entirely up to them. It was a performance about agency — and about what happens when you give an audience too much of it. Sixty years later, Sam Altman made a promise: OpenAI would treat adults like adults, and roll out an erotic mode for verified users. The market was there. Other...

Semaglutide's patent just expired in India. The molecule behind Novo Nordisk's blockbuster obesity drugs, Ozempic and Wegovy, is now fair game for generic manufacturers. An 85 to 90% price drop is expected. Eli Lilly's Mounjaro had already been outselling Wegovy. For most companies, this would be the beginning of an exit. But Novo is doing the opposite. Why? Tune in. Daybreak is produced from the...

India's hospitals have been slow to adopt AI. Its government, however, has not. A new programme aims to train 50,000 doctors in artificial intelligence. And not just to use it, but to help build it. The argument is simple: engineers understand disease like an algorithm. Doctors know it's never that clean. So what happens when clinicians become co-builders? Tune in. Daybreak is produced from the ne...

Bengaluru's water utility loses a third of everything it pumps. It owes Tokyo Rs 10,000 crore. It bleeds Rs 80 crore every month. Its answer to all of this was an app — GPS-tracked tankers, government-backed, 40% cheaper than the market. But nine months later the all the app has to show is 10,000 downloads and a 2.8 rating in a city of 14 million. So why are Bangalore's residents saying no to the...

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. Daybreak is produced f...

Seventy years ago, Homi Bhabha designed a three-stage nuclear plan built around one idea: that India's future was thorium, not uranium. The science was proven, the reactors were built, and by 1996, India had already demonstrated a thorium fuel cycle at an experimental reactor in Kalpakkam. What it never did was take it to commercial scale. In 2025, an eight-year-old American startup did exactly th...

India's telecom operators have spent decades controlling how signals reach customers indoors but that arrangement is now under serious pressure. A new breed of infrastructure companies, ones that do not own a spectrum and hold no licence, are taking control of how 5G reaches you inside airports, metro lines, malls, and office towers. The fight over who builds and who pays has drawn in regulators,...

India's Northeast has always had money. Wealth managers are only now showing up to court it, and finding the welcome chillier than expected. Post-GST, a wave of newly banked business wealth is looking for a home. Sophisticated products like AIFs, PMS, bonds, are finding takers. But Northeastern millionaires play by different rules. They don't respond to cold calls. They don't trust outsiders easil...

Last Friday, Razorpay CEO Harshil Mathur hosted 150 founders at Razorpay's Koramangala headquarters — not to talk payments but to let them showcase what they'd built with OpenClaw, the open-source AI agent taking the world by storm. The same week, thousands were queuing outside Baidu and Tencent offices in China just to get the software installed. The  open source agent AI platform is the same but...

The next time you pick up a strip of tablets at your neighbourhood pharmacy, consider this: the drug you just bought for Rs 170 may have left the factory for Rs 14. That's a markup of over a 1000%. And, it's completely legal. In this piece, The Ken's Mutasim Khan traces how India's drug pricing system works, and why the pharmacist, the doctor, and the manufacturer are all optimising for something,...

In 1955, a man from a small village in Kerala paid 500 rupees for passage on a crowded boat to Abu Dhabi. He told no one he was leaving.  He wasn't the first, and he certainly wasn't the last.  Over the decades, millions followed  — and the money they sent back quietly rebuilt everything: houses, schools, entire towns.  Today, remittances make up over a fifth of the state's economy. Which means wh...

India is drinking more — and spending more when it does. Between 2020 and 2025, alcohol consumption nearly doubled. Post-Covid, drinkers didn't just drink more; they upgraded. Four bottles where there used to be one.  Home bars where there used to be none. Global brands that once ignored India are now flooding distributors with enquiry emails. But the opportunity comes wrapped in one of the most c...

Within days of the war in Iran, panic spread across India’s cooking-gas system. Millions rushed to book LPG refills. Restaurants shut kitchens. A temple in Delhi halted its community meals. The government invoked emergency powers and warned hoarders they could face seven years in jail. But the panic revealed a deeper question. India now has 33 crore households cooking on LPG — one of the largest c...

Uber is one of the most recognised brands in the world. But in India, it's losing ground — to a government-backed taxi app, a newer competitor, and its own shrinking margins. So it's making a surprising bet: instead of fighting harder for your weekend ride, it wants to drive you to work. The B2B transport market it's entering has been run by specialists for decades. And those specialists aren't su...

Akasa Air wants to be India's most efficient low-cost carrier. Founded in 2022 by veterans who watched Jet Airways and Go Air collapse, the airline is copying IndiGo's early playbook — single aircraft type, ruthless cost discipline, long-term thinking. It has 35 planes, 5% market share, and serious backing from the Jhunjhunwala family.  But Boeing strikes delayed deliveries, pilots left, two co-fo...

Karnataka just announced it wants to ban children under 16 from social media.  Goa and Andhra Pradesh are considering the same. And on paper, it sounds like exactly the kind of protection kids need — platforms like Meta have spent years knowingly exposing children to addiction, exploitation, and harm, while spending millions lobbying against any legislation that would stop them.  So a ban feels li...

Indians put more than half their household wealth into real estate. But almost all of it goes into one kind: residential. Commercial property like offices, shops, warehouses, barely features in the average Indian portfolio. Some investors argue that that might be a mistake. Commercial real estate offers higher rental yields, steadier returns, and in some cases, fewer headaches than the family flat...

Swish launched less than a year ago with a simple promise: hot food in 10 minutes. It's already raised 16 million dollars, with another 30 to 35 million reportedly on the way.  But the giants who tried this before — Zomato, Zepto, Swiggy — have all stumbled, scaled back, or shut down. The problem isn't the idea. It's the math. Small order sizes, a lack of dedicated riders and razor-thin margins. ...