Daybreak

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. ...

Yesterday, Reuters reported, Indian refiners have rushed to secure prompt cargoes of Russian crude as the war involving Iran disrupts supplies from the Middle East. The crisis has choked traffic through the Strait of Hormuz — a route that normally carries around 40% of India’s oil imports — forcing companies to scramble for alternatives.  The shift is striking. New Delhi had spent months cutting b...

Deepinder Goyal, the founder of Zomato, has a new startup. It's called Temple — a wearable that tracks blood flow in your brain. His theory is that improving that flow could slow down aging. Doctors aren't convinced. Investors seem to be. Temple is valued at 190 million dollars. The science behind it hasn't been peer reviewed. And India has a rapidly aging population that could genuinely use some...

When Ozempic began changing how the world lost weight, most slimming companies panicked. But VLCC didn’t. Backed by Carlyle, it’s opening more clinics than ever before.  Because to Carlyle, Ozempic isn’t a threat—it’s just another doorway into India’s beauty economy. In this episode, we look at how VLCC’s new owners are turning an existential challenge into expansion, why its products are taking a...

Across India, many heirs are stepping away from running their inherited businesses to run family offices instead. They see investing as more flexible, more global, and less tied to daily operations. Their parents built factories but they are more interested in managing portfolios. It’s a practical shift but one that’s changing how old wealth works and what it values. What’s driving this change and...

In late January, a plane crash in Maharashtra killed the state's deputy chief minister, Ajit Pawar. It also exposed something few had been paying attention to: India's booming private charter industry, where demand is surging, corners are being cut, and the regulator is struggling to keep pace. There are now over 430 non-scheduled aircraft in the country. The top operator alone has 17 planes and 7...

Private equity has been buying up some of India's most prestigious schools. The pitch: better governance, professional management, and much-needed capital for a struggling sector. But inside some of these acquisitions, something else is happening. Teacher training budgets are shrinking. Salaries are stagnating. And in at least one case, a school is paying 65% of its revenue in rent — to a landlord...

This week, on Tuesday, India announced a sweeping overhaul of how it calculates GDP, fixing a measurement system the IMF had flagged as outdated just last November. It includes a new base year, better price data, and a wider net to count the informal economy. The number seems to be getting closer to reality. But that raises a harder question. For a country that has built its global identity around...

The next frontier of AI isn't in your phone. It's supposed to be around your neck, on your face, in your ear and out in the world with you. Tech companies have spent billions on that pitch. The generation they were counting on to buy it coined the term "hammerbait" instead. Today: the wearable AI moment, what it gets wrong, and the one version of this technology that might actually be worth wantin...

China’s stock market has delivered strong returns over the past year and a half. It has outperformed the US, which has long been the preferred global market for Indian investors. Even now, Chinese valuations appear relatively reasonable. But Indian investors face limited access. Only two mutual fund schemes currently accept fresh investments in Chinese stocks. Even if more options open up, experts...

Hosur built India's EV industry. Now it's running out of room — and a city many haven't heard of (mainly because it used to be Aurangabad) is quietly filling the gap. Sambhajinagar doesn't have Silicon Valley-style VC money or flashy government announcements. But what it does have is something harder to manufacture: a generational automotive ecosystem of factory owners, built over decades, now sca...