Daybreak

India is the world's top sunflower oil buyer, and Black Sea attacks have sent it hunting across South America. Shipments from Russia and Ukraine are running weeks late, and prices are climbing.

The substitutes are squeezed too. Indonesia is diverting more palm oil into biodiesel, and China's record soybean buying keeps the soy complex tight. A weak monsoon has thinned India's harvest. 

But the country has two oil problems, the crude it burns for fuel and the cooking oil it imports for the kitchen. It threw its capital at the fuel one first, reaching 20% ethanol blending years ahead of target. But feeding those distilleries takes land, and some of that land is coming from oilseeds. So the fix for one oil may gradually worsen the other.

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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.

Assam is enduring some of its worst flooding in years, with the death toll inching to a hundred and lakhs affected. It is also happens to be the state that recently landed India's first chip assembly plant, a ₹27,000 crore Tata facility, and the centrepiece of Japan's growing push into the Northeast. The plant itself is light on water.

But the deeper ecosystem Assam is chasing, chemicals and the rest of the chip supply chain, is thirsty, and the state is highlighting its abundant water as the draw.

The trouble is those same rivers flood it almost every year and despite rising spending, Assam still goes under.

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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 Tuesday, Trump announced 100% tariffs on generic medicines imported into the US. By Wednesday, Indian pharma stocks were already falling even though the tariff doesn't take effect for two years.

Trump wants import companies to reshore their manufacturing to the US so that the country can secure life-saving medication in the event of global supply chain disruptions.

India supplies nearly 50% of all generic medicines consumed in America — birth control, antidepressants, hypertension treatments. The companies most exposed say shifting manufacturing to the US in two years isn't realistic. Building a viable generics ecosystem there takes at least five.

But someone has to absorb the cost. And Indian companies have already said that moving is not a realistic plan — for now. Which means the ones picking up the bill are not the ones Trump thinks.

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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.

Burger King India is one of the country's better-run quick-service chains. Gross margins are at record highs, restaurant-level profits have doubled, and the burger chain has posted five straight quarters of same-store-sales growth.

So why does its stock sit close to where it listed six years ago?

Part of the answer is Indonesia, where an old acquisition keeps bleeding cash. The rest is the new owner. A pharma family has taken control of Restaurant Brands Asia, pouring in far more money than its expansion needs, much of it debt backed by pledged shares.

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*This episode is based on a story by Anirudh Somani who is also an investor in the company

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.

When Accenture employees in Pune walked into their appraisal meetings in May, they expected the routine conversations. Instead, they found out things would be done differently this year.

They did get their full salary hike. But not the way it was done up until now. Half went into the base salary. The other half arrived as a lump sum in June. On paper, nothing was lost. In practice, though, every future raise now compounds on a smaller number. And that's what affects gratuity, loan eligibility, and long-term salary growth. Even TCS has done something similar with bonuses.

Both are a consequence how the IT sector has been doing. It's market value has fallen by nearly Rs 9 lakh crore in five years. Which means, its likely the restructuring has only just begun.

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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.

In September 2022, Bengaluru's worst urban floods in recent memory swallowed the Outer Ring Road, including areas like Bellandur, Marathahalli, Mahadevapura, while the metro's Blue Line was under active construction through the same corridor.

Three years later, the metro corporation still wasn't in the room when the city held its monsoon preparedness meeting. It was never invited.

Weeks after that meeting, a hailstorm hit. Eight people died in an accident. The flooded areas sat directly above the upcoming Pink Line.

Mumbai. Pune. Bengaluru. Same story, different cities.

India is spending over Rs 2 lakh crore building metros that keep flooding the cities they're meant to fix. But the gap lies between the agencies building the city's infrastructure and the ones meant to take care of its drainage.

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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.

No coffee chain in India is clearly profitable. Third Wave Coffee, which lost 110 crore rupees in FY24 with nearly 70% of its stores in the red, is trying to change that with cake. Its new sub-brand, Third Rush, has put around 200 dessert items on the menu, with plans for 50 cafes by year-end.

CEO Rajat Luthra, former head of KFC India, has already pared the losses. The dessert margins clear 50% and the chain badly needs the footfall.

But customers walk into Third Wave for coffee not tres leches.

Can desserts turn the business around without changing its identity?

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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.

OpenAI's own research found that its heaviest users were also its loneliest and most emotionally dependent. The top 10% kept triggering classifiers built to detect unhealthy attachment.

The response was to build a screenless AI companion designed to live in your home, learn your habits, access your emails, and get harder to let go of over time.

Meta, meanwhile, is selling AI glasses with Kylie Jenner's voice for an extra hundred dollars — and they sold out before the launch event ended.

Both companies have documented the risks of AI dependency internally. Both are shipping anyway.

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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 airports to cricket broadcasts, India’s family conglomerates keep turning up everywhere. According to the 2024 Barclays-Hurun report, one family’s wealth alone equals nearly one-tenth of everything India produces in a year. India is running a version of the economic playbook that South Korea and Indonesia once ran — protect your conglomerates and let them do the building.

South Korea came through it, at enormous political and economic cost. Indonesia’s economy contracted by 13% in a single year.

India is somewhere earlier in that story. In this episode of Daybreak, host Snigdha Sharma asks which ending we are heading toward.

**This episode was first published on 26 May, 2026

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.

If you search "diabetes blood sugar level" on Google, the AI overview gives you a number. The number is wrong, the source is a hospital website, and the article on that website was written by AI.

This is the loop: AI writes flawed medical content for hospital websites, AI search tools treat it as authoritative, and the final result is patients make health decisions based on it. An audit of nearly 500 articles across Apollo, Max, Fortis, Medanta, and Artemis found incorrect drug recommendations, outdated protocols, and Western benchmarks applied to Indian patients.

Nobody is legally responsible. Nobody is fixing it.

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Listen to the Zero Shot episode 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.