Podcast · News

Daybreak

by The Ken · English · News

Business news is complex and overwhelming. It doesn’t have to be. Every day of the week, from Monday to Friday, Daybreak tells one business story that’s significant, simple and powerful. Hosted from The Ken’s newsroom by Snigdha Sharma and Rachel Varghese, Daybreak relies on years of original reporting and analysis by some of India’s most experienced and talented business journalists.

New episodes: Daily
Typical length: 15 min
Latest: 5 Oct 2026
Language: English

Latest episode

5 Oct 2026 · 21 minNew

Delhi built a ‘safe’ surveillance city. It can now locate anyone in seconds

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 Vikram Singh spent a month investigating Delhi’s ₹857-crore Safe City Project, conceived in the name of women’s safety. Its mandate now extends far beyond that, to crime prevention, public-order…

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Earlier episodes 29 most recent

4 Oct 2026 · 15 minNew

How Flipkart Minutes became the company's redemption arc

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 selection on the platform. In this episode, we look at how Minutes has made it work so far, and why Flipkart's push into quick commerce is becoming a way for it to secure its future. Daybreak is…
1 Oct 2026 · 11 min

Adani’s think tank flexes its muscles in Delhi

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 itself independent. And it's now one of the more visible and contested players in Delhi's policy world. So what exactly does Rs 100 crore buy you in India's policy ecosystem? Also listen to: Friday…
1 Oct 2026 · 10 min

India is burning through its coal buffer

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 running critically low on coal, with barely a week's worth left. Strangely, India isn't short of coal. About 76 million tonnes sits at Coal India's mines. But a weak monsoon drained the dams and flooded…
29 Sep 2026 · 15 min

Ekta Kapoor built her own OTT app. Now she's betting on YouTube

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 Youtube. Premium, shot in 4k and free to watch. So why is India's queen of TV soaps, skipping the subscription model? We dig into her belief in an audience that no one is serving, the Pakistani drama…
28 Sep 2026 · 13 min

Can India build a ‘UPI’ for your cows and your gold?

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 heavily on the RBI's digital rupee, which has seen little use four years after launch. And Indian banks have bet on blockchain before, without much to show for it. In this edition, Suprita Anupam…
27 Sep 2026 · 16 min

AI is Bollywood's cheapest new hire

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 shots, to even replacing some VFX work. Studio heads familiar with the space project shrinking crews and are already seeing timelines grow shorter. Still, it doesn't make the trade-off any less real.…
24 Sep 2026 · 15 min

UPI is the trojan horse taking small banks into HDFC, Axis's credit-card empire

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? Meanwhile, a matured tech stack has turned CLOU into a full-strength card equivalent, complete with real-time underwriting. And while CLOU had promised inclusion for those who can't normally access…
23 Sep 2026 · 14 min

How India's rich are finding returns in the country's court backlog

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 trying to build it. But they've run into a strange problem. The same backlog that makes the idea so attractive is also what makes it so hard. Because here, of course you are betting on whether a…
22 Sep 2026 · 16 min

Amazon’s quick-commerce win will be less about speed and more about Prime

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 can afford to lose money longer, and who has more to sell you than just groceries. Today, host Rachel Varghese digs into Amazon's $300 million infrastructure bet, the food-safety raids exposing…
21 Sep 2026 · 16 min

One year of GST 2.0. Who's it working for?

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.
20 Sep 2026 · 17 min

A cancelled peptide party, and the questions it raised that Indian sellers still can't answer

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's crossed over from Silicon Valley biohacking circles into Indian gyms, Instagram DMs, and D2C wellness brands, and the murky, largely unregulated supply chain, that runs through China, that gets…
18 Sep 2026 · 10 min

Why Indigo went budget and premium at once

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, holding the only serious listed bet in Indian aviation, are not. What do Indigo's owners understand that its flyers do not Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first…
16 Sep 2026 · 16 min

India's newest iPhone prices hurt the people selling them, buying them and even taxing them

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 more in India than it does in the US. But Apple is just a symptom of a larger problem. A global memory chip shortage is squeezing every phone maker and India's own tax structure is making it worse…
15 Sep 2026 · 13 min

7.8% growth. So why doesn't India feel richer?

In February this year, 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 being the world's fastest growing major economy, what happens when the arithmetic changes? And does any of it actually reach 1.4 billion people? Host Snigdha Sharma explores. Tune in. ( This…
14 Sep 2026 · 12 min

Your kids might be looting your bank account in the guise of gaming

Kids all over India are spending real money inside mobile games. And most of the time, they slip by the notice of the adults, until the bill or bank alert eventually arrives. Most of them are using their grandparent's or some other relative's phone, where UPI pins are usually already saved, and they're not watching so closely. In fact, Delhi's cybercrime cell has seen a rise in "fraud" complaints that turn out to be a child spending small amounts repeatedly on loot boxes and in-game stores. India's gaming law banned real-money games because but loot boxes slipped through, because it doesn't…
13 Sep 2026 · 12 min

⁠India's data law has HDFC Bank, Amazon, Paytm, and others shopping for consent

India’s new data protection law is reshaping how companies talk to customers on WhatsApp. Messages that once felt routine now carry legal weight and are tied to consent, security, and user rights. Since the Digital Personal Data Protection Act became operational, businesses have begun reworking how they collect and manage personal data. That shift has created a fast-growing market for compliance tools, drawing startups and established firms into the same space. As companies rush to avoid heavy penalties, disagreements are emerging over who should manage consent and how independent they need…
10 Sep 2026 · 13 min

This week in AI: activist robots, doom-laden researchers — so who's the good guy?

This week, a 27-year-old researcher quit Anthropic warning AI could "kill us all," and the company's own safety lead agreed. Meanwhile, OpenAI says it cracked a 200-year-old math problem — then got accused of muscling a rival's name off the credit. Also, the AI lab with a supposed conscience got caught building a watchlist of AI critics that files activism next to terrorism. And in Poland's Warsaw, 30 robots staged a protest to regulate AI. After all of this, who actually gets to be the good guy in the AI race? Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only…
9 Sep 2026 · 16 min

India has more tourists than ever. So why is tourism in trouble?

India's foreign tourist arrivals slipped by about 8% from the year before to about 9 million in 2025, and a wave of recent reporting has finally made it a talking point. If you take out the business travellers and the diaspora visiting family, the number who came just to holiday in India may be closer to 3 million. And yet Indians have never travelled their own country more. Domestic trips have crossed 4 billion. The government is pouring thousands of crores into tourist circuits and temple towns like Varanasi and Ayodhya while spending almost nothing to bring foreigners in. In this episode,…
9 Sep 2026 · 18 min

The Government sold Air India to escape its problems. The fix is to buy back in

In 1967, Air India paid Salvador Dalí for a custom ashtray with a live baby elephant, flown all the way to Spain. (Yes, really! Here's the proof .) That was the airline. Flush with money, just about 14 years into nationalisation. Today, it's asking its owners for $1.5 billion after its biggest loss ever, at more than 2 billion dollars. Privatisation was supposed to fix Air India. Three years on, it still hasn't. But the real story isn't a failed sale. It's a fatal crash, a closed airspace, and an industry that runs on razor-thin margins everywhere. But the actual fix might be closer than you…
7 Sep 2026 · 9 min

Nykaa cracked fashion at last. Myntra sees no reason to panic

After years of struggling to grow, Nykaa Fashion has finally found its footing. The past year brought a real resurgence. For a long time, the platform bet on building its own private-label brands, even pushing hard into ethnic wear. It leaned on discounts and backed small, up-and-coming labels. None of it delivered the growth it was chasing. So Nykaa Fashion changed course. That new strategy is at last starting to show results. What turned it around, and how long can it last? Tune in. Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform.…
6 Sep 2026 · 15 min

Rapido broke the ride-hailing duopoly. Now it's coming for Zomato and Swiggy

For over a year, India's restaurant association couldn't get Swiggy to return its calls. Then Rapido launched a food delivery app that charges restaurants zero commission — and Swiggy sent fifteen people to Bengaluru for an urgent meeting within days. The restaurants have a real grievance. On Swiggy and Zomato, commissions, ads, and discounts can eat up nearly a third of every order. On Rapido's platform, restaurants keep almost all of it. It's a good deal for restaurants. But even restaurant owners are wondering if it might be too good a deal to last. Daybreak is produced from the newsroom…
3 Sep 2026 · 23 min

India's call centres are using AI to make agents sound American

When you call an Indian call centre these days, the person answering might sound American — even if they've never left India. A new kind of AI can change an agent's accent in real time, mid-call, to sound more familiar to the customer. It's meant to build trust and cut hiring costs. But the same software that smooths out an accent often smooths away everything else too — laughter, tone, the small things that make a voice sound human. Some customers have started wondering if they're even talking to a real person. We dig into how this technology works, and what it costs the people whose voices…
2 Sep 2026 · 10 min

Meta's $18 billion child-safety settlement has India looking for the wrong answer

Last week, Meta agreed to pay up to $18 billion to settle American lawsuits over how Instagram and Facebook treat children. The app will now be rebuilt around American teenagers, from a daily time limit to an overnight curfew. But none of it is coming to India, the single biggest market Meta has anywhere in the world. So every op-ed page has been asking the obvious question. If Meta can protect a teenager in California, why should one in India wait? It sounds fair. But in this episode, host Snigdha Sharma argues the question is misdirected, and also that the fix we want to bring home would…
1 Sep 2026 · 20 min

India got cheap Ozempic. No one knows how to sell it

Ozempic went off-patent in India this year, and everyone from Novo Nordisk to Nestlé has rushed in expecting a billion-dollar market. Instead, growth has already stalled, and the reason isn't price. It's culture. While Hollywood joked about Ozempic on late-night TV and Serena Williams advertised a GLP-1 program for a tele-health platform at the Super Bowl, not a single Indian celebrity has admitted to using it. We trace why the drug ran out of India's easiest customers within months, why its next move — into Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities — might not work either, and what it would actually take to…
31 Aug 2026 · 9 min

A worker-owned Uber is India's fix for its ever-expanding gig workforce

Union Home and Cooperation Minister Amit Shah launched Bharat Taxi, a government-backed, driver-owned ride-hailing service built to take on private players like Ola and Uber. It runs as a cooperative so the drivers own it. And when it profits, they keep 80% of the money. Nearly 800,000 have already signed up. It is the government's boldest bid yet to pull gig workers out of a precarious market and hand them a stake in it. There is just one problem. No one in Indian ride-hailing has ever turned a profit. So what is a driver-owned cab service really for, if the payday it promises may never…
30 Aug 2026 · 12 min

The best savings product your bank offers is the one it advertises less

At least 44% of Indians have their money sitting in savings accounts. These accounts earn only about a fraction of what a fixed deposit pays. But even though FDs earn more, the payoff is that you have to lock away your money for longer, and pay a penalty if you break the account prematurely. But did you know there's a product built to solve this exactly? It's called a Flexi-FD, and it promises FD-level returns with the liquidity that comes with savings accounts. Most banks offer it. And yet, not a lot of people have heard of it. The Ken's Inderpal Singh gets into why banks aren't exactly…
27 Aug 2026 · 12 min

The great Indian sugar trap: how a decade of surplus left India with nothing to spare

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 forecast, at 30.6 million tonnes. The world's second-largest sugar producer just became an importer. How? Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news…
26 Aug 2026 · 14 min

Welcome to the 'brain gym': DIY neurotech is now in India, no prescription required

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 consumers, no prescription and no regulator sign-off, on the argument that it's simply a consumer electronic. The Ken reporter Sudeshna Ray wore one herself to find out how that feels. Can medicine's oldest…
25 Aug 2026 · 19 min

Banks are being asked to become “cool” for Gen Z. Their problem isn't branding

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 Varghese asks why India's public banks misdiagnosed the problem, what it's actually costing young borrowers, and whether the tools to fix it, like cheaper credit, and faster underwriting, that…

About Daybreak

Daybreak is a English news podcast from The Ken. Melo plays each episode straight from the publisher's own feed — no ads added, no account needed — and remembers where you stopped, in this browser only.

Publisher: The Ken
Language: English
Category: News
New episodes: Daily
Typical length: 15 min
Latest episode: 5 Oct 2026
Feed: RSS — paste into any podcast app
Apple Podcasts: podcasts.apple.com/podcast/id1658118308
Website: the-ken.com/podcasts/daybreak
Rights: (c) 2023 The Ken

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Daybreak

Latest episode

Delhi built a ‘safe’ surveillance city. It can now locate anyone in seconds

Earlier episodes 29 most recent

How Flipkart Minutes became the company's redemption arc

Adani’s think tank flexes its muscles in Delhi

India is burning through its coal buffer

Ekta Kapoor built her own OTT app. Now she's betting on YouTube

Can India build a ‘UPI’ for your cows and your gold?

AI is Bollywood's cheapest new hire

UPI is the trojan horse taking small banks into HDFC, Axis's credit-card empire

How India's rich are finding returns in the country's court backlog

Amazon’s quick-commerce win will be less about speed and more about Prime

One year of GST 2.0. Who's it working for?

A cancelled peptide party, and the questions it raised that Indian sellers still can't answer

Why Indigo went budget and premium at once

India's newest iPhone prices hurt the people selling them, buying them and even taxing them

7.8% growth. So why doesn't India feel richer?

Your kids might be looting your bank account in the guise of gaming

⁠India's data law has HDFC Bank, Amazon, Paytm, and others shopping for consent

This week in AI: activist robots, doom-laden researchers — so who's the good guy?

India has more tourists than ever. So why is tourism in trouble?

The Government sold Air India to escape its problems. The fix is to buy back in

Nykaa cracked fashion at last. Myntra sees no reason to panic

Rapido broke the ride-hailing duopoly. Now it's coming for Zomato and Swiggy

India's call centres are using AI to make agents sound American

Meta's $18 billion child-safety settlement has India looking for the wrong answer

India got cheap Ozempic. No one knows how to sell it

A worker-owned Uber is India's fix for its ever-expanding gig workforce

The best savings product your bank offers is the one it advertises less

The great Indian sugar trap: how a decade of surplus left India with nothing to spare

Welcome to the 'brain gym': DIY neurotech is now in India, no prescription required

Banks are being asked to become “cool” for Gen Z. Their problem isn't branding

About Daybreak

More English news 6

Take it with you