Daybreak

India's southwest monsoon is running 35% below normal. Mumbai's reservoirs are at 12% of capacity. And the rain that should have arrived by June 11th still hasn't. The same water and power systems that keep this economy running are now being asked to power India's AI future too — a $180 billion data centre bet that nobody is stress-testing against a failing monsoon and climate change.

The groundwater is already over-extracted. The grid hit an all-time demand record in May. And the choice about who gets water first when there isn't enough has already been written into law in some states.

Zepto just filed its DRHP. It wants to open 1,900 new dark stores, on top of the 1,139 it already runs. Blinkit, the only profitable player in the sector, is racing to 3,000 stores by March 2027. Meanwhile, its adjusted EBITDA is just Rs. 37 crores — not a lot considering the billions that have been spent on getting it to profitability.

The dark store is quick commerce's core bet — and its biggest fixed cost. Rents are rising, FMCG prices are up, and user growth at Zepto actually declined between December and March despite spending over Rs 1,300 crore on advertising.

The mode...

India is spending over 10,000 crore rupees building what it calls sovereign AI. The servers are going up in Mumba and the ministers are saying the word at every summit.

There is just one problem: nobody has defined what sovereign actually means.  And the chips powering all of it are American, subject to American law. A US subpoena can reach a data centre in Mumbai as easily as one in Seattle.

In this edition of Make in India Competitive Again, The Ken reporter Mrunmayee Kulkarni delves into what this really means.

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Amazon Now launched in September 2025. It was already two years behind Flipkart, and well behind Blinkit and Zepto. 

Nine months later, it's doing 450,000 to 500,000 orders a day, expanding to 100 cities, and a Blinkit executive is walking through Colaba market, stopping in front of an Amazon dark store in a location Blinkit's expansion head could only dream of.

Amazon has something its rivals don't: 150 million Prime members who already shop five times more frequently. And since bundling quick commerce with Prime, their order frequency has tripled.

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Adani started buying apples in Himachal Pradesh two decades ago. Not because it wanted to be in the fruit business — but because it wanted to own the cold chain that nobody else was building.

Now the India-New Zealand free trade agreement is about to test Indian apple growers like never before. New Zealand yields 50 to 70 tonnes per hectare. Himachal Pradesh averages 7 to 8.

Adani just expanded into cherries, plums, and peaches — fruits even more perishable than apples. The bet is the same as it always was: whoever controls refrigeration, controls the market.

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This 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 th...

India 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...

Every 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...

Two 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...

Amazon 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.

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Andhra 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 wa...

Anthropic 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 en...

Swiggy 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...

Seventeen 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...

India 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...

A mutual fund executive told our colleague something shocking: "SIPs are a problem."

Part of the shock came from the fact that it  was coming from someone in an industry that was basically built on "SIP sahi hai."

Now a new research paper backs up that controversial take—and the findings contradict what millions of Indian investors have been told about systematic investment plans.

Turns out the marketing narrative around SIPs has some serious gaps. The math tells a different story. And with small-cap SIP assets exploding 6.5x since 2019, the stakes have never bee...

In 1998, a Metal Gear Solid villain named Psycho Mantis read your memory card out loud and made your controller vibrate on its own. Players were stunned. It felt like a genuine invasion. And they loved it.

In 2026, Microsoft built an Xbox assistant that could do roughly the same thing. Plus some more. Track your history, read your screen, coach you through the game. Players were stunned. It felt like a genuine invasion. And they hated it.

The viral hate train began in March 2026. Two months later, the new Xbox CEO killed it.

The...

From airports to cricket broadcasts, India's family conglomerates keep turning up everywhere. According to the 2024 Barclays-Hurun report, one family's wealth alone equals nearly one-tenth of everything India produces in a year. India is running a version of the economic playbook that South Korea and Indonesia once ran — protect your conglomerates and let them do the building.

South Korea came through it, at enormous political and economic cost. Indonesia's economy contracted by 13% in a single year.

India is somewhere earlier in that story. In this episode of Daybreak, host Snigdha Sharma asks which ending we are he...

Bookmyshow has spent two decades building India's live events business. It organised Coldplay's India tour, controls 70% of online movie ticketing, and has long-term exclusive deals with nearly every major multiplex chain.

Then Zomato launched District in August 2024. In its first full year, it quadrupled revenue, edged past Bookmyshow on app downloads, and became the exclusive ticketing partner for half the IPL. It's still losing money. Eternal doesn't seem to mind.

Because District isn't trying to beat Bookmyshow at its own game. It's building a different one entirely.

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On Wednesday, Meta began firing 8,000 people.This makes up 10% of its global workforce. The cuts started at 4am on 20 May, rolling across time zones. People found out by email. Meta's quarterly revenue that same week: $56 billion. It's capex guidance for 2026: up to $145 billion, almost all of it going into AI. This is the current trend in Big Tech: record profits, mass layoffs, redirect to machines, repeat. 

Then, closer home: Unacademy is being sold to upGrad for $218 million — over 90% below its 2021 peak of $3.44 billion. The edtech gold rush is over and what's left is the reckoning.

Tun...

Adani Group has spent the last decade building India's largest private airport empire. But owning nine airports turned out to be only the beginning.

From aircraft maintenance to pilot training to ground handling, the group is now reaching into every corner of the aviation business. Airlines operating at Adani airports are already feeling the squeeze — on pricing, on vendor choice, on the terms of doing business.

India has never had a single player control this much of the aviation stack.

Are the regulators keeping up?

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Virat Kohli's new Meta Oakley ad has 40 million views in two weeks — more than every other athlete in the global campaign, including the one that aired during Superbowl. 

The tagline says Athletic Intelligence is here. 

But the ad shows the glasses answering questions, playing music, and recording a slow-motion shot. The athletic part is mostly just Kohli.

India's smart wearables market is set to triple by 2033. Fifty million Indians already make health decisions based on what these devices tell them. Studies show a 30-80% error rate on something as basic as calorie counting.

Three weeks before the FIFA World Cup kicks off in the US, India still does not have a broadcaster for the tournament. JioStar offered $20 million. FIFA said no. Sony did not bid at all. A petition has reached the Delhi High Court asking that matches at least air on Doordarshan.

The easy explanation is that FIFA got greedy. 

But that does not explain how the world's biggest sporting event ends up with no takers in a country with more than 300 million football fans.

In today's episode, host Snigdha Sharma looks at what FIFA f...

The Indian government just moved two million email accounts off NIC's servers onto Zoho's cloud. 

The reason the government decided to leave behind a system it had built and run for 40 years? A list of issues; including ransomware attacks, power outages, and even a blackout on a New Year's Eve that knocked out Parliament's website.

The fix was a seven-year, 200 crore rupee contract with a private Indian company. Zoho actually scored lower than Google and Microsoft in the government's own assessment. Bur it won the assessment anyway.

Thing is, India spent years building o...

Jio Studios is now the largest production house in India by revenue, catalogue, and box-office share. It got there fast. Stree 2, Laapataa Ladies, Dhurandhar, all Jio. The Dhurandhar franchise alone is closing in on Rs 3,000 crore worldwide.

Meanwhile, Dharma, Excel, Maddock, and Bhansali have all sold significant stakes just to stay in the game. Jio simply does not need to. It has Reliance's telecom network, streaming platform, and marketing muscle all working together. The studio model that Bollywood once abandoned is back.

But can Jio can build an identity to go with it?

...

Gen Z was supposed to be AI's most enthusiastic adopters. For a while, they were. Then the hiring froze, the jobs disappeared, and the tools got good enough to make the question uncomfortably personal.

Excitement about AI among Gen Z is down 15% since last year. Anger is up 9%. But the more interesting story isn't the sentiment shift — it's what's happening underneath it. Writing skills degrading without anyone noticing. Complacency creeping in. A generation becoming, in one colleague's words, more boring.

The curiosity is there and so is the dread. And, often in the same person.

Air India’s board met in Mumbai last week to discuss cost cuts, CEO succession, and whether to start charging business class passengers separately for meals and lounge access. The airline is projecting losses exceeding ₹22,000 crore for the financial year just ended, nearly double the year before. Campbell Wilson is stepping down as CEO.

International flights are being cut by over 20%. Jet fuel costs are up 63% since the war on Iran began. But the crisis arrived at an airline already deep in trouble.

In today’s episode, we look at what was happening inside the Tata t...

On a Wednesday morning in April, The Ken's Mrunmayee Kulkarni went to Rushikonda beach in Visakhapatnam looking for a manhole. She found it — a concrete chamber with a reinforced lid, no armed guard, no exclusion zone, no legal protection. In a few years, it will be one of the landing points for the world's longest undersea cable.

95% of India's internet — every payment, every message, a $341 billion services economy — runs through cables like this. The nearest repair ship is in Singapore. There is no protection law. And 60% of that traffic runs through a war zone.

What happen...

India's carmakers are staring down a deadline. 

In less than a year, new emission norms will require them to dramatically cut their carbon output — or pay hundreds of millions of dollars in fines. Electric vehicles were supposed to be the answer. But the batteries aren't ready, the infrastructure isn't there, and adoption has been slower than anyone predicted.

So the industry has quietly pivoted to an unlikely stopgap: CNG. Tata, Maruti, and Hyundai are all betting on it. In fact, two in every five Maruti cars sold last year ran on the fuel.

But...

India's best AI models are confidently wrong. Not occasionally — structurally. If you put two unrelated ideas into a prompt, the model will usually invent a connection rather than admit that none exists.

In this piece, The Ken's Debanjali Biswas traces what a five-month study of leading AI models — from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google — actually found about how they reason. The results landed almost every model in what researchers are calling the "danger zone", which shows high confidence and low accuracy.

This is a read aloud of Debanjali's original story, by Rachel Varghese, on Daybreak.

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...

The Parle-G packet has cost five rupees since the 1990s. Once, when the company tried raising it by 50 paise, consumers switched to Britannia's Tiger within weeks. The price was rolled back. That's how sensitive this market is.

But something else has been changing — quietly, and without announcement. The packet that was once 100 grams is now 45. And Parle-G isn't alone. Dabur, Britannia, Nestlé, Godrej — all cutting weight, all in the same quarter, all for the same reason.

A war in West Asia has sent packaging costs up by 40 to 75%. The buffer won't last. What comes next?

...

West Bengal and Tamil Nadu declared their results yesterday. BJP swept Bengal after fifteen years of TMC rule. In Tamil Nadu, Vijay's TVK won, upending the DMK return almost everyone had predicted, including the platforms that had money on it.

Prediction markets are now a $150 billion industry. And they were taking live bets on India's assembly elections, on a platform India officially banned last year. In a recent edition of The Ken's Make In India Competitive Again, Seema Singh wrote about an interesting research paper. While most assume the trading volumes were not high enough for concern...

Market shocks hit retirees harder than anyone else. For those just retired or on the verge of it, a sharp early drop in portfolio value can cause damage that compounds quietly over decades, long after markets recover.

The American war in Iran is the latest trigger. And it may not be the last.

The good news: careful planning can offset the risk. A concept called the safe withdrawal rate, used correctly, can be the difference between a corpus that lasts 30 years and one that runs out in 20.

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In November 2024, one of India's biggest FMCG companies, Hindustan Unilever, started getting a barrage of complaints from its consumers, who said they were seeing the same Dove and Surf Excel ads repeatedly on OTT platforms during a single watch session. Some of them were shown the same ads as many as 150 times within a week.

With IPL around the corner, HUL — which spends nearly Rs 4,000 crore on ads annually — couldn't afford to ignore these complaints. So what followed was a series of investigations. And what they discovered has opened a real can of worms for not just...

Investors are calling India's home-services market quick commerce's next big moment. Instahelp, Snabbit, and Pronto are betting big on it. They're sending trained workers to your door in under 10 minutes, at prices cheaper than a coffee. Orders, naturally, are in the millions.

But the difference is that quick commerce eventually figured out how to make money. Here, on the other hand, 82% of consumers have already said they won't pay more than Rs 200 an hour. 

And on every order placed today, the market leader is losing twice what it earns.

So who exactly is t...

Diet Coke disappeared from Bangalore's shelves, and a teenager's frustrated Reddit post accidentally explained why: the Strait of Hormuz.

When the US-Israel war on Iran began in February, fuel shipments slowed. Aluminium furnaces went cold. PET resin prices jumped 75%. At least 25 plants shut completely. In one Odisha industrial belt alone, 700 of 1,500 workers lost their jobs.

But the war only made an existing problem worse — India had already tightened import rules on aluminium cans, leaving beverage companies dangerously dependent on West Asian buffer stock.

The shortage was always coming. The war just decided that it...

Last week, Rihanna was all over our social media feeds as she flew to Mumbai for the official India launch of Fenty Beauty. Now it is exclusively available through Reliance Retail's beauty company, Tira. This was the popstar's second visit to India in two years; the first being a private performance at Anant Ambani's pre-wedding celebrations in 2024, her first paid show in eight years.

For a woman who built her entire brand on never showing up on anyone else's terms, there's something worth examining here. Fenty is valued at nearly $3 billion and India's premium beauty market is...

At Kochi's Infopark, two models of the IT industry sit 500 metres apart. 

Infosys and Wipro: sprawling campuses, thousands of engineers, margins built on scale. 

IBM: a smaller hub, senior-heavy teams, focused on enterprise AI. Same city, completely different bets on the future.

India's IT giants are expanding into tier-2 cities because they're cheaper. 

But AI is quietly making the old logic — hire more, deliver at scale — look like the wrong answer. Infosys and Wipro's stocks have nearly halved since 2021. IBM's has doubled.

So what does Kochi reveal about where Indian...

Lightrock arrived in India with nearly a billion dollars and royal backing — the Liechtenstein dynasty's centuries-old fortune funding bets on around 40 growth-stage startups.

The firm moved fast, doubled down on existing investments more aggressively than most peers, and scaled hard during the zero-interest-rate boom. Then the cycle turned. Its portfolio — Waycool, Pharmeasy, Dunzo — ran into trouble. New cheques dried up.

Lightrock shifted from investor to caretaker, managing what it had rather than building what came next. A royal wager on Indian tech, still waiting for a payoff.

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