Daybreak

Hosted by The Ken

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768

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Jun 2026

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About the 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.

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60 recent

June 15, 2026Episode 77214 min

Sovereign AI, American law

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.Listen a free episode of The Ken's First Principles feat Riyaz Amlaani with Rohin Dharmakumar hereDaybreak 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.

June 14, 2026Episode 77112 min

Why Amazon seems so calm about being awfully late to quick commerce

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.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.

June 12, 2026Episode 77013 min

Can Adani do with apples what Mahindra did with grapes?

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.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.

June 10, 2026Episode 76912 min

India's mango paradox

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 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.

June 10, 2026Episode 76813 min

Analysts say gas prices are about to crash. India still can't afford to celebrate

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 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.

June 9, 2026Episode 76710 min

LIC has lost its throne to SIPs. It’s still the smartest investor in the room

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 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.

June 7, 2026Episode 76611 min

NEET’s switch from pen-and-paper to computer: damned if you do, damned if you don’t

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 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.

June 4, 2026Episode 76511 min

Why Big Tech is tokenmaxxed out

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.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.

June 4, 2026Episode 76424 min

Google is now Andhra Pradesh's first private electricity company. You'll be paying for that

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 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.

June 2, 2026Episode 76313 min

The AI gold rush is over. The emperors are cashing out

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 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.