Daybreak

Bengaluru's water utility loses a third of everything it pumps. It owes Tokyo Rs 10,000 crore. It bleeds Rs 80 crore every month.

Its answer to all of this was an app — GPS-tracked tankers, government-backed, 40% cheaper than the market.

But nine months later the all the app has to show is 10,000 downloads and a 2.8 rating in a city of 14 million. So why are Bangalore's residents saying no to the state's efforts?

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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.

From platforms like Cred, Zerodha, and Groww integrating AI assistants, to Sebi-registered advisors now using AI to generate personalised investment recommendations, the shift is already underway. 

And with nearly 140 million investors and fewer than a thousand registered advisors to serve them, the math alone might make AI advice not just convenient, but necessary.

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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.

Seventy years ago, Homi Bhabha designed a three-stage nuclear plan built around one idea: that India's future was thorium, not uranium. The science was proven, the reactors were built, and by 1996, India had already demonstrated a thorium fuel cycle at an experimental reactor in Kalpakkam.

What it never did was take it to commercial scale. In 2025, an eight-year-old American startup did exactly that — with a fuel designed specifically for Indian reactors, and a former chairman of India's Atomic Energy Commission on its board of advisors. So what happened in between?

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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 telecom operators have spent decades controlling how signals reach customers indoors but that arrangement is now under serious pressure.

A new breed of infrastructure companies, ones that do not own a spectrum and hold no licence, are taking control of how 5G reaches you inside airports, metro lines, malls, and office towers. The fight over who builds and who pays has drawn in regulators, sovereign wealth funds, and the Supreme Court.

And it points to a much larger shift in who really owns the network.

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India's Northeast has always had money. Wealth managers are only now showing up to court it, and finding the welcome chillier than expected.

Post-GST, a wave of newly banked business wealth is looking for a home. Sophisticated products like AIFs, PMS, bonds, are finding takers.

But Northeastern millionaires play by different rules.
They don't respond to cold calls. They don't trust outsiders easily. And they have little patience for managers who can't answer basic questions.

So what does it actually take to win a client here — and why are so many wealth managers still getting it wrong?

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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.

Last Friday, Razorpay CEO Harshil Mathur hosted 150 founders at Razorpay's Koramangala headquarters — not to talk payments but to let them showcase what they'd built with OpenClaw, the open-source AI agent taking the world by storm.

The same week, thousands were queuing outside Baidu and Tencent offices in China just to get the software installed.

The  open source agent AI platform is the same but the two approaches are quite different. China is deploying OpenClaw at a scale and speed no other country is matching. India, meanwhile, is moving carefully, deliberately, problem-first.

So here's the question: is India behind China on OpenClaw? And is speed is the only thing that matters in the AI race?

Read Inc42's report here: The New Garage: OpenClaw And India’s DIY AI Agent Boom

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.

The next time you pick up a strip of tablets at your neighbourhood pharmacy, consider this: the drug you just bought for Rs 170 may have left the factory for Rs 14. That's a markup of over a 1000%. And, it's completely legal.

In this piece, The Ken's Mutasim Khan traces how India's drug pricing system works, and why the pharmacist, the doctor, and the manufacturer are all optimising for something, while the patient simply pays.

This is a read aloud of Mutasim's original story, by Snigdha Sharma, on Daybreak.

📖 Read the full story on The Ken: Wake up, Neo. There’s a glitch in the pharma matrix

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 1955, a man from a small village in Kerala paid 500 rupees for passage on a crowded boat to Abu Dhabi. He told no one he was leaving. 

He wasn't the first, and he certainly wasn't the last. 

Over the decades, millions followed  — and the money they sent back quietly rebuilt everything: houses, schools, entire towns. 

Today, remittances make up over a fifth of the state's economy. Which means when war broke out across the Middle East last month, Kerala isn't just watching from a distance. The hurt is closer home.

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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 drinking more — and spending more when it does. Between 2020 and 2025, alcohol consumption nearly doubled. Post-Covid, drinkers didn't just drink more; they upgraded. Four bottles where there used to be one. 

Home bars where there used to be none. Global brands that once ignored India are now flooding distributors with enquiry emails. But the opportunity comes wrapped in one of the most complicated regulatory systems in the world — 69 permits for a single brand in some states, margins so thin most retailers stock only five or six labels. India is still a teenager. 

The hangover hasn't hit yet.

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Within days of the war in Iran, panic spread across India’s cooking-gas system. Millions rushed to book LPG refills. Restaurants shut kitchens. A temple in Delhi halted its community meals. The government invoked emergency powers and warned hoarders they could face seven years in jail. But the panic revealed a deeper question.

India now has 33 crore households cooking on LPG — one of the largest cooking-gas networks in the world. Yet the country’s strategic underground reserves amount to less than two days of national demand.

And interestingly, in last year’s budget documents, the government told Parliament it had no plans to build any new LPG storage caverns. Almost no one noticed that line until now.

How did the world’s most ambitious clean-cooking programme end up with a buffer this thin?

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.