India is building data centres at unprecedented speed to support cloud services, AI, and digital growth. At the same time, cities across the country are struggling with water shortages and repeated contamination of drinking-water supplies.

A new United Nations report describes this condition as water bankruptcy. It is the stage where water systems continue to function, but only by drawing down reserves that cannot recover fast enough.

In this episode, host Snigdha Sharma looks at how India’s data centre push fits into that reality, drawing lessons from cities abroad where similar tensions have already surfaced.

So as India builds for a digital future, the question is simple: who decides how much water that future can afford?

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 new undergraduate framework was supposed to fix a broken system — where only 8% of graduates land jobs that match their degrees.

The fix? Give students hundreds of courses to choose from, blend formal education with vocational training, and make them more employable. But when every course carries the same two credits, students do the math quickly and the easier course wins.

Now universities are scrambling, edtechs are stepping in to teach core curriculum, no one's quite sure who's in charge and it's not really clear if this reform is fixing employability yet.

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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 a fintech conference in February, Razorpay showed a demo.

A user ordered food on Zomato by voice and paid — without opening a checkout page or a UPI app. No friction and no redirects. Just a job done end-from-end.

The same week, OpenAI quietly rolled back its own in-chat shopping agent.

Razorpay is calling this the biggest disruption to payments since UPI. But agentic commerce raises questions that a demo can't answer — around trust, fraud, consent, and who's liable when an AI spends your money.

Is India ready for that? Is anyone?

Hosts Snigdha Sharma and Rachel Varghese, speak to The Ken reporter Mutasim Khan. 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.

A cartoon reposted. An account restricted. A takedown notice with no warning and no appeal.

India's new IT rules give platforms three hours to remove flagged content — the shortest window anywhere in the world. But a draft amendment published last month could go even further, potentially treating anyone who posts about current affairs as a publisher. Without the protections that come with it.

For millions of creators, anonymous users, and global tech platforms, the stakes just got harder to ignore.

The deadline to push back is April 14th.

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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 civil aviation ministry issued two directives this March that pulled in opposite directions. First, it mandated full refunds for cancelled flights. Three days later, it removed all caps on airfares. The trigger for the second move: the US-Israeli war against Iran has sent jet fuel prices soaring, up nearly 60% in the US, and India is bracing for the impact.

Airlines, already running on thin margins, are warning that fares will rise.

For Indian flyers, the net result is this: cancellations just got free but flights just got more expensive.

How did we get here?

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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 wants to design its own semiconductor chips. To help, the government launched a scheme with money and tools for startups that do exactly that.

But there's a catch — and it's keeping out the very people best placed to build this industry.

The engineers who spent decades in Silicon Valley, built the chips inside your devices, and are now coming home. A regulator that's also a competitor. And a factory that was supposed to be for Indian startups — but probably won't be.

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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.

Imagine paying insurance premiums for years and then one day you actually need it. You're in a hospital, or someone you love is. And the insurer says: no.

In the last financial year, Indian health insurers rejected claims worth ₹30,000 crore. Nearly one in eight claims were denied or left pending.

And what's wild is how far back the problem starts. There are agents filling out forms incorrectly to earn a faster commission. Hospitals that know exactly what a surgery costs but keep the number vague on purpose. And insurers operating on margins so thin that scrutinising every claim is more about survival than greed.

The Ken reporter Sudeshna Ray dived into this for The Ken’s Make India Competitive Again newsletter. Host Snigdha Sharma reads it for you in this episode.

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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.

Polymarket and Kalshi are two New York-founded prediction market platforms now valued in the billions. While both let users bet real money on elections and political events in real time, it is Polymarket — the larger, offshore, largely unregulated one — where someone made nearly a million dollars predicting US military strikes on Iran before they happened. Together, the two platforms processed over $44 billion in bets last year.

In this episode, host Snigdha Sharma explores how two New York startups turned opinion into a tradeable asset — and what happens when the people placing the biggest bets already know the answer.

India banned online money gaming last year. These platforms are taking bets on our elections 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.