This September was supposed to give India's power grid a break. Instead, on some nights, the gap between the electricity people wanted and what the grid could supply reached almost 8 gigawatts, bigger than anything seen during this year's heatwaves. Kerala restricted power in the evenings. Near Patna, villagers blocked a highway after three days without electricity. And 82 power plants were running critically low on coal, with barely a week's worth left.

Strangely, India isn't short of coal. About 76 million tonnes sits at Coal India's mines. But a weak monsoon drained the dams and flooded the coal belt at the same time.

So how much breathing room is there between you and a power cut?

This episode was edited by Arnav Prakash.

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.

In the 2000s, Ekta Kapoor's serials ruled Indian TV every night on weekdays.

Then as, audiences moved from TV screens to smaller ones and streaming, her company, Balaji Telefilms followed. It bet on its own streaming app: ALTBalaji.

For years, it lost money. Until finally, it shut down last year after a government ban in 2025. Now, Balaji is taking 5 new shows and a combined 200 episodes to Youtube. Premium, shot in 4k and free to watch.

So why is India's queen of TV soaps, skipping the subscription model? We dig into her belief in an audience that no one is serving, the Pakistani drama effect and whether a bet on Youtube's ad model is enough for TV.

This episode was edited by Arnav Prakash.

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.

Earlier this month, at the Global Fintech Fest in Mumbai, India's regulators and industry leaders rallied around one idea: tokenisation, which turns assets like bonds, gold and land into digital units that can be bought, sold and settled in seconds. Some of it is already underway, with three companies recently raising over Rs 1,000 crore through bonds that settled the same day.

But the plan leans heavily on the RBI's digital rupee, which has seen little use four years after launch. And Indian banks have bet on blockchain before, without much to show for it.

In this edition, Suprita Anupam examines whether tokenisation can do for financial assets what UPI did for payments.

This is a read aloud of a newsletter edition of Ka Ching, by Snigdha Sharma on Daybreak by The Ken.

📖 Read the full story on The Ken: Can India build a ‘UPI’ for your cows and your gold?

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.

Bollywood has been seeing tough times since Covid.

Theatre footfall still haven't recovered, even as box office numbers soar, and budgets for filmmakers are only getting tighter.

AI seems to have a brought a glimmer hope for some in the industry, as it slowly makes its way into every stage of filmmaking. From identifying good concepts to writing scripts, storyboarding scenes, generating entire shots, to even replacing some VFX work.

Studio heads familiar with the space project shrinking crews and are already seeing timelines grow shorter. Still, it doesn't make the trade-off any less real.

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.

After two years of slow adoption, Credit-Line-on-UPI is finally taking off, but not with the big banks.

Small banks and fintechs are leading the charge, while the big incumbents that dominate credit cards hold back.

For HDFC and Axis, it's a really difficult choice. Should they compete on CLOU and risk cannibalising their own cards, or scale it through the very fintechs they're trying to outmatch?

Meanwhile, a matured tech stack has turned CLOU into a full-strength card equivalent, complete with real-time underwriting. And while CLOU had promised inclusion for those who can't normally access credit, the promised inclusion has actually been flipped.

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.

Make The Ken's Daybreak X First Principles Autumn Playlist here.

India has roughly 54 million cases stuck in its courts. Inside many of them is money someone is owed but can't afford to chase.

What if you could invest in that? Back the case, pay the legal bills, and take a cut if it wins. In the US and the UK, this is already a multi-billion-dollar asset class. In India, a handful of funders are trying to build it. But they've run into a strange problem. The same backlog that makes the idea so attractive is also what makes it so hard. Because here, of course you are betting on whether a case wins…but more importantly, you're betting on when.

In a recent edition of our weekly newsletter Ka Ching, The Ken reporter Mutasim Khan looked at who's making this bet, who's putting up the money, and who it's actually helping. 

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.

Make The Ken's Daybreak X First Principles Autumn Playlist here.

Amazon Now just crossed $1 billion in annualised gross sales, faster than Zepto did.

But it's still miles behind Blinkit, still losing money in India, and still playing catch-up on scale.

So why is its latest investment not focused on quick commerce?

Because for Amazon, the real fight isn't about who delivers fastest. It's about who can afford to lose money longer, and who has more to sell you than just groceries.

Today, host Rachel Varghese digs into Amazon's $300 million infrastructure bet, the food-safety raids exposing cracks in the dark-store model, and why Prime, and not 10-minute delivery, might be Amazon's actual edge heading into festive season.

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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One year ago, GST 2.0 rewrote the tax on almost everything Indians buy — from soap to cars.

It promised a simpler system and cheaper shopping. 

Twelve months on, we ask the obvious question: is it working? 

Tune in.

India was about to have its first-ever peptide party with fifty guests, a mystery venue marketed only as "not a hospital," and a menu of collagen, glutathione, and copper peptides. Then the Karnataka Food Safety and Drug Administration started asking questions, and the party was cancelled overnight.

On this episode, The Ken's Sudeshna Ray joins host Rachel Varghese to unpack the peptide craze that's crossed over from Silicon Valley biohacking circles into Indian gyms, Instagram DMs, and D2C wellness brands, and the murky, largely unregulated supply chain, that runs through China, that gets these substances into the country in the first place.

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.

For two decades, an Indian air ticket told you what kind of airline you were flying. Low-cost meant cheap and bare. Full-service meant meals and baggage folded into the fare. That line is now almost gone. Indigo's new Lite fare strips economy down to a cabin bag, even as its Stretch cabin and BluChips programme reach for the premium flyer Air India once owned. 

Passengers are uneasy but investors, holding the only serious listed bet in Indian aviation, are not. 

What do Indigo's owners understand that its flyers do not

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.