Daybreak

Hurun India began curating rich lists a decade ago. Now, it has moved up ahead of ranking giants like Bloomberg and Forbes with 17 lists so far. It has a Global 500 list, similar to Bloomberg’s Billionaire Index.

In fact, at this point, it's safe to say that it has replaced Forbes as the most trusted choice for bankers and wealth managers.  Hurun has managed to turn showing it off into a cultural trend despite the fact that wealth is often wrapped in secrecy in a country like India. So what’s really driving India’s obsession with ranking the richest? Hurun India has grown way beyond its original rich lists, creating rankings for just about everything you can think of—from self-made entrepreneurs to top art collectors. They even track billionaires by zodiac signs.

Today we look at Hurun India beyond just these lists— a closer look at the behind the scenes relationship it has with wealth-management firms, and how it keeps the ultra-rich happy.

*This episode was previously published on November 18, 2024

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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.

For decades, the whole process of getting a loan approved was infamously painful and long winded. But now things have changed. Getting a loan is a whole lot faster than before. And that’s because of the disruptor to end all disruptors — artificial intelligence. 

A bunch of companies have entered the scene with specalised AI tools to speed up different aspects of the loan-approval process.  In fact,  Indian AI startups have managed to raise nearly 750 million USD in 2024 and the banking and financial sector was one of the top drivers of this growth. 

Now at first glance, it seems like a win-win for both the borrower and the bank. But there’s a catch. This surge has come with a lot of scrutiny from the RBI. 

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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.

On the 25th of November 2024, just five days before the placement drive began at the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, a new role was suddenly added to the student’s placement portal. Tech giant Microsoft was looking for a bunch of promising silicon hardware engineers. 

This was the first time Microsoft was hiring for this particular role. And it wasn’t just looking at the top tier IITs like IIT Madras. Students at IIT-ISM Dhanbad in Jharkhand, saw the same exact thing happen. 

Why, you may ask? One word. Nvidia. Until now, companies like Microsoft, Amazon and Google have been the most direct beneficiaries of the AI revolution. But the Nvidia monopoly in the AI chip market is preventing these tech companies from making as much money as possible. Microsoft wants to change that. 

That’s exactly where a team of freshly minted hardware engineers comes in. The company is hiring graduates who know hardware programming to test and design its own chips. 

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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.

2024 was the year of the 10-minute delivery. We think we didn't need it but the likes of Zepto, Swiggy Instamart, and Blinkit proved us wrong. While other companies were struggling to find funding, these quick-commerce companies were raising billions of dollars and reporting double-digit, sometimes even triple-digit annual growth rates.

In December, Zomato’s quick-commerce subsidiary, Blinkit made a strategic move in the rapidly growing quick food delivery market space. It launched ‘Bistro’, a platform that will deliver food and beverages within 10 minutes. Interestingly, this was just a day after its competitor Zepto introduced the Zepto Cafe. Swiggy too already has a 10-minute food delivery service called Bolt, and unlike the others, it is inside their original app.

Is this just another indulgence or has quick commerce reached a point where players are so paranoid that they’re trying to hold on to customers who think that a food delivery that takes 40 minutes is too slow?

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Also, listen to: Why we date, marry, or breakup with Swiggy Instamart, Blinkit, Zepto & BigBasket

Tell us what you thought of this episode. You can text us your feedback on WhatsApp at +918971108379

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.

Welcome to the big fat sustainable Indian wedding! 

Over the last few years, sustainability has become a big buzz word in the wedding industry. Multiple wedding planners told Daybreak that couples are now increasingly asking for more ‘sustainable’ alternatives while planning their big day — from offsetting the carbon footprint of the event, to setting up compost pits in the middle of their wedding venues. 

This growing environmental consciousness makes sense. You see, as beautiful and fairytale-esque the typical Indian wedding is known to be, it is also infamously wasteful. 

But here's the thing — while some couples may be thinking about ‘sustainability’ more than before, the numbers tell a whole different story. Indian weddings aren’t getting any smaller. They are bigger and more expensive than ever before. About Rs 6 lakh crore was spent on weddings in 2024. That’s a 40 per cent increase from the previous year. And that’s not all – data shows that one in every 100 of those weddings had a budget of over Rs 1 crore. 

So how does sustainability co-exist with the grandeur of the Indian wedding? And can it? Daybreak host Rahel Philipose speaks to Ashwin Malwade, founder of Greenmyna, a sustainable event planning company, and Anirudh Gupta, the co-founder of Climes, a climate tech company.

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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.

At the end of 2024, Indigo, India’s largest airline, was voted as the airline of the year by Centre for Aviation (CAPA) at the 2024 Global Aviation Awards for Excellence. And then just a couple of weeks later, the airline was in for a rude shock when a survey by a German consumer-rights group ranked it among the worst 10 airlines in the world. Indigo, of course, refuted the findings of the survey and cast doubts on the credibility of the agency that released it.

Monthly data from aviation regulator DGCA had scored Indigo high on punctuality and low on customer-complaint ratios, and it was a big deal “for an airline of its size and scale of operations”.

But you see, that is exactly where the problem lies—size and scale.

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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.

Correction: In the episode, the host said SpiceJet is not listed. That is factually incorrect. The error is regretted. 

The sexual wellness industry has long been shrouded in taboo. But now, thanks to quick commerce, getting a stamina supplement or a massage wand has become as effortless as ordering a packet of milk.

In the process, the long standing dominance of the old guard – the likes of Durex, Manforce and Score – has also been challenged. That's because these quick commerce platforms shone a light on the many upstarts that have entered the market in the last few years. These brands are breaking the long held taboos associated with sexual wellness and entering the mainstream by doing what others never could.

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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.

For an Indian university, a spot on the QS Rankings list could change everything. It would mean they belonged to the same elite club as the Cambridges and Oxfords of the world.

But to nab that spot, universities are stopping at nothing — from admitting more foreign students, to paying top dollar to hire consultants and purchasing seats at conferences. But in the process some fear these universities are neglecting their bread and butter — academics.

How did we get here? What's behind this growing obsession with climbing up the global ranking ladder?

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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 month though, things went crazy in Delhi NCR's real estate market. A DLF penthouse property in Gurgaon, a little over 16,000 square feet in size, sold for a mind-blogging Rs 190 crores. Just the stamp duty was Rs 13 crores, apparently.  

What really shocked the internet though was the per-square-foot price—Rs 180,000. When The Ken reporter Rounak Kumar Gunjan first came across it, he immediately forwarded the news article to some of his friends who are planning to buy flats to give them a sense of the madness out out there. But his frinds, he says, pulled off a UNO reverse.

Because they told him something else about India’s real-estate space that was even more intriguing. An increasingly common sinister pattern in home loans that he has since confirmed with two bankers and two insurance industry executives. 

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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.

Today’s episode dives into a fascinating book called Desperately Seeking Shah Rukh: India’s Lonely Young Women and the Search for Intimacy and Independence, by Shrayana Bhattacharya, an economist with the World Bank’s Social Protection and Labour unit for South Asia. In this groundbreaking work, Shrayana unpacks the economic and social realities of Indian women through the stories of ten individuals from vastly different backgrounds—an upper-caste engineer, a flight attendant, a Muslim garment worker, and a tribal domestic worker, among others.

But, you may wonder, where does Shah Rukh Khan fit into all this? And why would an economist care about a Bollywood superstar? For Shrayana, Shah Rukh Khan isn’t just a fan obsession, he’s a research method. And through it, she discovered that the one unifying thread among these women was their love for the actor. So he became the lens through which she explored their dreams, struggles, and aspirations. For one woman, he symbolises professionalism and for another, he embodies the hope of breaking free from social barriers.The book offers a unique, raw glimpse into the everyday battles Indian women fight for independence, economic liberty, and basic dignity. Shrayana also reveals how the actor represents the spirit of economic liberalisation in India—a figure who carries the promise of opportunity and upward mobility.

In this episode, host Snigdha Sharma chats with Shrayana about the phenomenon of Shah Rukh Khan, the shifting role of women in India’s economy, the concept of “dal sabzi feminism,” the economics of “chik-chik,” and so much more.

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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.