Daybreak

21:00

Delhi built a ‘safe’ surveillance city. It can now...

Daybreak ·

2026/10/05

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

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15:11

How Flipkart Minutes became the company's redemption arc

Daybreak ·

2026/10/04

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

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10:31

Adani’s think tank flexes its muscles in Delhi

Daybreak ·

2026/10/01

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

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10:22

How much breathing room does your power supply...

Daybreak ·

2026/10/01

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

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15:03

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

Daybreak ·

2026/09/29

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

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12:38

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

Daybreak ·

2026/09/28

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

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15:37

AI is Bollywood's cheapest new hire

Daybreak ·

2026/09/27

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

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15:20

Small banks found a trojan horse into the credit-card...

Daybreak ·

2026/09/24

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

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14:14

How India's rich are finding returns in the country's...

Daybreak ·

2026/09/23

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

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16:23

Amazon’s quick-commerce win will be less about speed...

Daybreak ·

2026/09/22

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

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15:55

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

Daybreak ·

2026/09/21

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.Tap here to help us make The Ken's Daybreak X First principles Autumn Playlist

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17:18

A cancelled peptide party, and the questions it...

Daybreak ·

2026/09/20

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

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10:21

Why Indigo went budget and premium at once

Daybreak ·

2026/09/18

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

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16:26

India's newest iPhone prices hurt the people selling...

Daybreak ·

2026/09/16

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

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12:33

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

Daybreak ·

2026/09/15

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

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12:06

Your kids might be looting your bank account in the...

Daybreak ·

2026/09/14

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, Delihi'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

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12:15

⁠India's data law has HDFC Bank, Amazon, Paytm, and...

Daybreak ·

2026/09/13

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

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12:57

This week in AI: activist robots, doom-laden...

Daybreak ·

2026/09/10

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

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15:35

India has more tourists than ever. So why is tourism...

Daybreak ·

2026/09/09

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

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18:10

The Government sold Air India to escape its problems....

Daybreak ·

2026/09/09

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,

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