Daybreak

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...

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...

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 runnin...

In the 2000s, Ekta Kapoor's serials ruled Indian TV every night on weekdays. Then as, audiences moved from TV screens to smaller ones and streaming, her company, Balaji Telefilms followed. It bet on its own streaming app: ALTBalaji. For years, it lost money. Until finally, it shut down last year after a government ban in 2025. Now, Balaji is taking 5 new shows and a combined 200 episodes to Youtub...

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...

Bollywood has been seeing tough times since Covid. Theatre footfall still haven't recovered, even as box office numbers soar, and budgets for filmmakers are only getting tighter. AI seems to have a brought a glimmer hope for some in the industry, as it slowly makes its way into every stage of filmmaking. From identifying good concepts to writing scripts, storyboarding scenes, generating entire sho...

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?...

Make The Ken's Daybreak X First Principles Autumn Playlist here . India has roughly 54 million cases stuck in its courts. Inside many of them is money someone is owed but can't afford to chase. What if you could invest in that? Back the case, pay the legal bills, and take a cut if it wins. In the US and the UK, this is already a multi-billion-dollar asset class. In India, a handful of funders are...

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...

Tap here to help us make The Ken's  Daybreak X First principles Autumn Playlist One year ago, GST 2.0 rewrote the tax on almost everything Indians buy — from soap to cars. It promised a simpler system and cheaper shopping.  Twelve months on, we ask the obvious question: is it working?  Tune in.

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...

For two decades, an Indian air ticket told you what kind of airline you were flying. Low-cost meant cheap and bare. Full-service meant meals and baggage folded into the fare. That line is now almost gone. Indigo's new Lite fare strips economy down to a cabin bag, even as its Stretch cabin and BluChips programme reach for the premium flyer Air India once owned.  Passengers are uneasy but investors,...

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 mo...