Daybreak
Hosted by The Ken
About this Show
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.
Latest Episodes
Dogs have a nose for cancer. An Indian startup is betting on them
Less than 1% of Indians get tested for cancer, and with full body scans costing as much as Rs 25,000, it's not surprising. Dognosis, a Bengaluru startup, has a solution. It trains dogs to sniff out cancer early, runs their responses through a Bayesian model, and compares the results with...
India’s largest financial-sector FDI is coming. But what does the public get?
On 14 October, the Cabinet approved selling nearly 61% of IDBI Bank to the Canadian firm Fairfax for nearly ₹53,000 crore. Once completed, it will be the largest FDI in India’s financial sector. But IDBI was rescued with public money, largely through LIC. Now LIC stands to get back rough...
Why your Diwali shopping is more important than MDR on UPI
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 ...
After making a fortune at the dock, Adani's next bet is a fleet of 100 ships going offshore
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 hundr...
Air India needs saving. Singapore Airlines is playing saviour
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 t...
What happens when you put Indian business on a 2x2?
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 ...
India’s food inflation has layers. The onion is only the first
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 ...
7-Eleven promised "Everything essential". It still lost to India's corner shops
“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 l...
Karnataka can’t fix its potholes. So it’s building an AI city
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 fo...
Bollywood wants to offend nobody. AI is happy to help
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 li...
Why your next IIT, IIM reunion will feel like a sales pitch
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-...
Apple and Google's app stores are the next battleground for protests
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 sw...
Nike needs India’s sneaker heads. But do they need Nike?
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 Bangal...
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 dem...
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...