Podcast
Daybreak
Hosted by The Ken · EN
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.
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India's mango paradox
3d ago00:12:17Tap to summarizeThis week, Nepal sent Indian mango shipments back to the border after inspectors found excessive pesticide residues . A few weeks earlier, Japan had suspended all Indian mango imports after a biosecurity inspection failure at a treatment facility in Uttar Pradesh. Two bans in one season and this was before the war in Iran tripled freight costs and shut the Gulf route entirely. Mirza Ghalib, the famous Urdu poet, famously had just two requirements of a mango — to be sweet and plentiful. This season, the country that grows half the world's supply couldn't guarantee either to the rest of the world. How did we get here? Host Snigdha Sharma explores.Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.
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Analysts say gas prices are about to crash. India still can't afford to celebrate
3d ago00:13:51Tap to summarizeIndia just found natural gas off the Andaman coast. The energy minister called it "an ocean of energy opportunities." Considering India's energy vulnerabilities, this is a significant find, even if commercial production is a decade away.Because in the meantime, the war on Iran has doubled LNG prices, cut off Qatar (which supplied nearly half of India's imports) and pushed India into buying six times more American gas than it was before the conflict began. The US has already used energy as a bargaining chip in the tariff standoff last year, putting India again in a tough spot.But now analysts are predicting a global LNG glut. And while cheaper imports do sound like relief, they might just be another trap.Read Blas's piece here.Read Anand's piece for The Ken here.Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.
Transcribe →LIC has lost its throne to SIPs. It’s still the smartest investor in the room
4d ago00:10:07Tap to summarizeEvery month, millions of Indians pay their LIC premium without a second thought. What they don't realise is that money is quietly buying up India's most beaten-down stocks — the ones foreign investors are dumping, the ones mutual funds won't touch, the ones everyone else is running from.For decades, LIC was the only institution large enough to hold Indian markets together during a sell-off. That role now has company. SIP money has grown into a second pillar of domestic support, and LIC's grip on the market is loosening.But its investing instincts? Still the sharpest in the room.Tune in.Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.
Transcribe →NEET’s switch from pen-and-paper to computer: damned if you do, damned if you don’t
6d ago00:11:18Tap to summarizeTwo million students. One lakh twenty thousand seats. And a paper that leaked before anyone sat down to write it.This is the second NEET leak in two years. The National Testing Agency was created specifically to prevent this. A parliamentary panel had already warned, after last year's controversy, that the NTA was too dependent on private vendors and lacked the institutional capacity to run exams at this scale. The government's response: move the exam online by 2027.But NTA's own tech partners have a track record that makes that solution harder to trust than it sounds.Tune in.Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.
Transcribe →Why Big Tech is tokenmaxxed out
1w ago00:11:31Tap to summarizeAmazon built a leaderboard to track how much AI its engineers were using. Employees gamed it. Costs exploded. Last week, the leaderboard was gone.Uber burned through its entire annual AI budget in four months — after telling staff to use AI "as much as possible." Microsoft cancelled most of its Claude Code licences six months after rolling them out.Three companies, the same couple months, the same lesson: that measuring AI adoption is turning out to be a very different thing from measuring AI productivity.Tune in.Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.
Transcribe →Google is now Andhra Pradesh's first private electricity company. You'll be paying for that
1w ago00:24:38Tap to summarizeAndhra Pradesh wants to be India's data centre capital. Google, Meta, and Reliance have all been promised space in Vizag. To make it work, the state did something it has never done before — handed Google its own electricity licence, letting it bypass the state grid entirely.The logic is straightforward. The consequences are not. When large consumers leave the grid, electricity gets more expensive for everyone else. Farmers lose subsidies. Factories pay more. Coal plants stay open longer than planned.And somewhere in Vizag, a data centre is being built 120 metres from the city's drinking water reservoir.Host Rachel Varghese and reporter Mrunmayee Kulkarni discuss.Read Mrunmayee's story on the electric grid load here.Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.
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The AI gold rush is over. The emperors are cashing out
2w ago00:13:08Tap to summarizeAnthropic raised $65 billion last week making it the largest funding round in AI history. It also filed for an IPO days later. So did OpenAI and SpaceX after its merger with xAI. Three of the most powerful AI companies in the world are heading to public markets in the same window. They're flush with capital but burning through more than they earn. Meanwhile, the startups that were supposed to be the next wave are being quietly absorbed. The funds that would have backed them are drying up. So what exactly does the future of AI entrepreneurship look like from here on?Tune in.Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.
Transcribe →Why Swiggy wants to stay out of the Flipkart-Amazon spending war
2w ago00:11:01Tap to summarizeSwiggy CEO Sriharsha Majety told Bloomberg in an interview last week that his company would stay out of the spending war being waged by Amazon, Flipkart, and Reliance in India's quick commerce market. He invoked the Airtel-Jio price war as a precedent, argued that chasing market share through discounts only postpones the problem, and said Swiggy has Rs 15,000 crore in the bank to play the long game.But Swiggy invented this category. And Blinkit, which came years later, now has twice the dark stores, twice the users, and losses that are narrowing. So is this a strategy or a rationalisation?Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.
Transcribe →Inside foreign universities’ desperate attempts to woo indifferent Indians
2w ago00:10:56Tap to summarizeSeventeen foreign universities have set up campuses in India in two years. Most can't fill their seats. And a Rs 1,000 crore scholarship push launched last month is the most visible sign yet that something isn't working.The pitch is this: a western degree without the visa hassle, at Rs 15 to 25 lakh a year, which is roughly what Ashoka and Plaksha charge, but without the research environment or the actual campus. Students who wanted to leave India aren't particularly interested in a single-floor setup in a Gift City corporate building.So why are so many foreign universities suddenly this desperate for Indian students?Tune in to find out.*Correction: The host mentions that Emeritus is the parent company of Eruditus. Eruditus is the company that has partnered with seven schools for a revenue-sharing model, not Emeritus. Emeritus is a brand under Eruditus. *Clarification: The profit Eruditus posted of $400 million is independent of its partnerships with the universities. Classes under this partnership are yet to start and has made no revenue yet.Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.
Transcribe →India spent $33 billion trying to fix BSNL. It forgot the most important part
2w ago00:10:11Tap to summarizeIndia has pumped over $33 billion into BSNL since 2019. But the person running the company finds out every three months if they still have the job.Multiple candidates have been interviewed for the full-time position but no one has been hired yet.The finances have improved in the last two years but the telco's market position has kept sliding. And the decisions that actually matter — where to launch 5G, which markets to chase, what kind of company BSNL even wants to be — are all waiting on a leader who might not be around to see them through.So what happens to a $33 billion bet when no one's really in charge?Tune in to find out.Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.
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