Daybreak

Tenants across India's six biggest metros have handed landlords Rs 1.26 trillion in security deposits, a new NoBroker study estimates. Around $15 billion of tenant money, refundable in name, sits in landlords' accounts earning interest for people it does not belong to.

In this episode, host Snigdha Sharma ask what a deposit actually costs a renter, and arrives at a number: nearly a month's rent, every year. The same tenant who pays 2 months' deposit in Mumbai is asked for 10 in Bengaluru, and in Delhi NCR, about 4 in 10 never got their full deposit back.

Renting was meant to be a phase. But with home ownership drifting out of reach, tenants may be extending this loan for decades.

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Recommendations:
It sucks to be a tenant in Bengaluru right now

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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.

Cred just reported its first profitable quarter. Meta invested 8,500 crore rupees. And Kunal Shah walked out the door.

Eight years of questions about Cred's business model ended the moment it finally had answers. The design-first, exclusivity-obsessed fintech that rewarded creditworthy Indians with gold credit cards now makes most of its money from lending — the same way every other UPI app does.

Shah left for WhatsApp. Meta needed someone who could monetise a billion Indian users without making regulators nervous.

What that means for both companies is the more interesting question.

Scripted by Snigdha Sharma based on the report by Suprita Anupam.

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.

Netflix built its empire on one idea: watch what you want, when you want, all at once. Now it's losing viewers to YouTube, struggling to bring audiences back for season two, and internally discussing always-on live channels and ad bundles you can't skip.

Which is to say: it's considering becoming cable TV.

The irony is that while Netflix is scrambling for answers in the US, India may already have one. A reality show that airs almost every night at 8pm just cracked Netflix's global top 10. The format that streaming was supposed to kill is doing just fine. And Netflix is finally realising why.

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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 October last year, a ship owned by Adani Ports slowed to less than one knot near Malta. It held that position for over seven days, directly above the cables linking Malta to Sicily. It was no accident. 

India's largest private port operator has quietly built a fleet of more than a hundred vessels across 12 countries. Their job is servicing the world's offshore energy infrastructure. The business grew 134% in a single year. 

Ports made Adani rich. But there are only so many ports you can build. 

What the conglomerate does next may depend on waters far from any dock. 

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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 April, India made AI education mandatory across 28,000 CBSE schools, giving them 90 days to comply. Most had already finalised their academic calendars for the year.

Some schools were ready. Others scrambled. A few found that the harder problem wasn't the teachers — it was the students. At one Hyderabad school already using an AI learning tool, kids were 

From 2029, AI becomes a compulsory board exam subject and the government is betting that deadline will change everything.

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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.

Naresh drives for Rapido. When his phone died, so did his income — for seven days, until he could borrow enough to replace it.

Until 2024, India's biggest consumer lenders had turned that exact vulnerability into a recovery tool. Miss an EMI, lose your phone. It worked so well that smartphone lending grew from 1% to nearly 40% of consumer borrowing in three years. 

Then the RBI banned it. 

Lending collapsed by 80%. Delinquencies rose. Rejection rates hit 50%.

Now the tool is coming back. This time with guardrails. The question is whether they're enough.

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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 week, the government ordered Apple and Google to pull at least three battery management system or BMS apps that were being used to switch off e-rickshaws mid-road. If you've been on Instagram, you've seen the videos. A prankster opens the app, taps a switch, and a passing e-rickshaw just dies.

It works because the cheap lithium batteries these vehicles run on often ship from China with their Bluetooth wide open, no password at all. The flaw was documented publicly years ago and nothing happened until it went viral. The batteries are still exposed.

In this episode, host Snigdha Sharma asks what really governs safety in India's informal economy.

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*We want to get to know you a little better. Tell us what you think about Daybreak 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.

WhatsApp just announced usernames for Indian users. Two days later, the Indian government told it to stop.

The privacy case for usernames is real — phone numbers are permanent, linked to everything, and once shared, impossible to take back. 

But India already has 43,000 WhatsApp-related cybercrimes in a single quarter. And when TechCrunch tested the feature, handles like "rbi_verify," "indiamodi," and "ambanijio" were still available for anyone who gets there first.

WhatsApp has until tomorrow to explain itself to MeitY. And even if the deadline keeps getting extended, the problem isn't going away.

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.

Your AC is running longer this year and the machines responsible may have been designed for a different climate entirely. Optimist, a two-year-old Gurugram startup, has built what it says is India's most energy-efficient residential AC. It is recalibrated for Indian humidity, sourced almost entirely from local suppliers, and engineered with components the industry has long considered too expensive to bother with.

But 70% of AC sales in India happen offline, shelf space belongs to brands with decades of dealer relationships, and Optimist is nowhere on the floor yet.

How long can a better product afford to wait?

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 May, L'Oréal ended a 16-year agency relationship. The reason? Simply that a competitor was better prepared with better data and AI capabilities.

This incident illustrates the shift that's happening in advertising right now. The agencies that bet on technology early are pulling ahead. The ones that are built on relationships are finding out how quickly those erode.

Sitting unnoticed at the top of this reshuffled industry is Accenture Song. It's the world's largest advertising agency that doesn't really call itself one. It made 20 billion dollars last year. And it's barely visible in India. 

And that lack of visibility? That's by design.

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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.