Daybreak

Private equity has been buying up some of India's most prestigious schools. The pitch: better governance, professional management, and much-needed capital for a struggling sector.

But inside some of these acquisitions, something else is happening. Teacher training budgets are shrinking. Salaries are stagnating. And in at least one case, a school is paying 65% of its revenue in rent — to a landlord owned by the same firm that owns the school.

Some investors have made it work. Others have changed something harder to measure.

In this episode, hosts Snigdha Sharma and Rachel Varghese speak to The Ken reporters Valli Vikram and Mutasim Khan about how private-equity firms squeeze money out of schools and what that does to them.

Read the stories here:
Private equity’s priority for Indian schools: pickleball courts over teacher training by Valli Vikram
The private-equity handbook for turning non-profit schools into cash cows by Mutasim Khan

If you have any thoughts on this episode write to us at [email protected] with Daybreak in the subject line. You can also leave us a comment on our website or the YouTube channel here.

Disclosure: Reporter Valli Vikram comes from a family that previously owned a school acquired partially by International Schools Partnership (ISP)

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, on Tuesday, India announced a sweeping overhaul of how it calculates GDP, fixing a measurement system the IMF had flagged as outdated just last November. It includes a new base year, better price data, and a wider net to count the informal economy. The number seems to be getting closer to reality.

But that raises a harder question.

For a country that has built its global identity around being the world's fastest growing major economy, what happens when the arithmetic changes? And does any of it actually reach 1.4 billion people?

Host Snigdha Sharma explores.

Tune in.

If you have any thoughts on this episode write to us at [email protected] with Daybreak in the subject line. You can also leave us a comment on our website or the YouTube channel 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.

The next frontier of AI isn't in your phone. It's supposed to be around your neck, on your face, in your ear and out in the world with you.

Tech companies have spent billions on that pitch. The generation they were counting on to buy it coined the term "hammerbait" instead.

Today: the wearable AI moment, what it gets wrong, and the one version of this technology that might actually be worth wanting. Host Rachel Varghese explores.

Tune in.

Read Song's review of Friend here.
Rachel here! I didn't start reading a tech review expecting a truly heartwarming take on real friendships, but it works!

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.

China’s stock market has delivered strong returns over the past year and a half. It has outperformed the US, which has long been the preferred global market for Indian investors. Even now, Chinese valuations appear relatively reasonable.

But Indian investors face limited access. Only two mutual fund schemes currently accept fresh investments in Chinese stocks.

Even if more options open up, experts advise restraint. The rally is tempting but experts warn investors from getting carried away.

Tune in.

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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.

Hosur built India's EV industry. Now it's running out of room — and a city many haven't heard of (mainly because it used to be Aurangabad) is quietly filling the gap.

Sambhajinagar doesn't have Silicon Valley-style VC money or flashy government announcements. But what it does have is something harder to manufacture: a generational automotive ecosystem of factory owners, built over decades, now scaling up for an electric future.

Toyota noticed. And Ather. And JSW. This is the story of how a small city in Maharashtra became the surprising centre of India's next industrial bet.

If you have any thoughts on this episode write to us at [email protected] with Daybreak in the subject line. You can also leave us a comment on our website or the YouTube channel 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.

India hosted the world's biggest AI summit this week — 100+ nations, $200 billion in commitments, and enough billionaire handshakes to fill a highlight reel.
But beneath the spectacle lies a sharper question: when will it be India’s turn to build AI, instead of just buying into it? Snigdha breaks down the gap between infrastructure ambition and intelligence sovereignty.

In other news, Mark Zuckerberg walked into a US courtroom as Meta, YouTube, TikTok and Snapchat face a landmark trial.
The allegation? That teen addiction wasn't an unfortunate byproduct of the way social media works — it was built into the product. Rachel explains why this case could change everything.

If you have any thoughts on this episode write to us at [email protected] with Daybreak in the subject line. You can also leave us a comment on our website or the YouTube channel 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.

Big Tech is preparing to spend $650 billion on AI infrastructure this year, a figure that rivals national economies. The focus is agentic AI, systems designed not just to generate answers but to execute tasks independently.

The vision is software that can read your messages, access your calendar, contact your friends, move money and complete transactions without step by step supervision. In effect, technology that can act in the world on your behalf.

To function, these systems require sweeping access to personal and corporate data. Critics warn this amounts to asking users to “put your brain in a jar.”

What exactly is being built and who bears the risk?

If you have any thoughts on this episode write to us at [email protected] with Daybreak in the subject line. You can also leave us a comment on our website or the YouTube channel 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.

Anthropic just set up in Bangalore, announcing partnerships across health, education, and government. The "ethical AI" company is positioning itself as the responsible alternative to OpenAI.

But the Wall Street Journal revealed the US military used Claude to help capture Venezuela's former president—violating Anthropic's own guidelines prohibiting violence and surveillance.

Now the US government wants Anthropic to drop those restrictions entirely. The company is caught between its founding principles and its home government's demands, which brings up questions about data sovereignty into focus. Host Rachel Varghese digs in.

*The host mistakenly says NCPI instead of NPCI

Listen to my episode on Claude Cowork and the "SaaSpocalypse" here.

Listen to Snigdha's episode on why ChatGPT is cheapest in India here.

If you have any thoughts on this episode write to us at [email protected] with Daybreak in the subject line. You can also leave us a comment on our website or the YouTube channel 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.

Over the past six months, Blinkit has been making a structural shift that most customers would never notice. For years, its fresh fruits and vegetables were sourced by Hyperpure, its own parent company Eternal’s business-to-business arm that also supplies restaurants. As Blinkit grew into Eternal’s primary revenue driver, Hyperpure grew with it. In FY25, more than 60% of Hyperpure’s revenue came from Blinkit.

Then Blinkit decided to source its own inventory.

Hyperpure’s revenue more than halved in two quarters. It is now separating its books and rebuilding around restaurants.

What does the split mean?

If you have any thoughts on this episode write to us at [email protected] with Daybreak in the subject line. You can also leave us a comment on our website or the YouTube channel 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.

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 been higher.

So when are SIPs actually appropriate?

Tune in.

If you have any thoughts on this episode write to us at [email protected] with Daybreak in the subject line. You can also leave us a comment on our website or the YouTube channel 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.