2026 was the first IPL season after India banned online real money gaming last year. The platforms were gone and the payment gateways were blocked. The government had made its position clear. 

The betting, however, did not stop. 

The Ken's Mrunmayee Kulkarni went looking for where it went and found it hiding inside something the government itself built. On platforms like 99 Exchange, gamblers deposit and withdraw money directly through UPI, gambler to gambler, with no mule network and no victim to file a complaint. 

But the ED's tools were designed for a system that leaves a trail. This one doesn't.

In this episode, Mrunmayee joins host Snigdha Sharma to walk through how the money actually moves, and why the enforcement machinery has no good answer for it yet.

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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.

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.

But almost nobody wants to say it out loud.

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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.

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 model is scaling. But will the economics ever catch up?

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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.

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 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.

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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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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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.

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.

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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.