Meet Ranjan. He works at Deloitte by day and spends his evenings strapping a camera to his forehead, recording himself doing household chores by evening. He's a physical AI trainer, a part of a growing gig economy built around creating training data to teach humanoid robots human behaviour. Reporter Sakshi Sadashiv joins host Rachel Varghese to break down how this supply chain works: from gig workers in Delhi, to the firms like Tesla and Nvidia that eventually buy their footage from the companie...
Jun 25, 2026•28 min•Ep. 780
This week, Instagram expanded its TV app to Samsung Smart TVs, joining Amazon Fire and Google TV, and announced it is testing episodic series and live creator experiences for the big screen. The announcement is the latest move in an eight-year pattern — a platform that keeps giving creators more time, more formats, and now a larger screen. Instagram tried long-form video once before. It called it IGTV, and shut it down three years later. So if short-form video was supposed to be the future, why ...
Jun 24, 2026•11 min•Ep. 779
On June 11th, TCS announced an exclusive partnership with Anthropic — 50,000 employees trained on Claude, early access to new models, a dedicated business unit. The next day, a US export control order cut off access to Anthropic's most advanced models for users worldwide, including the very partner that had just signed up for early access. India's IT sector has spent years building its AI pivot on the assumption that access to frontier models would stay open. That assumption just cracked. And wh...
Jun 23, 2026•13 min•Ep. 778
India's telcos looked like the obvious gateway for AI companies chasing scale. With nearly 900 million subscribers between them, Jio and Airtel could put an AI product in front of more users faster than almost any other distribution channel in the world. So Google paid Jio and Perplexity paid Airtel. Both spent tens of thousands of rupees per user to make it work. One partnership is still standing but the other collapsed before its time was up. And OpenAI — the company with the largest AI user b...
Jun 22, 2026•9 min•Ep. 777
In 2022, Mamaearth's founder made two unusual logistics bets: one on a shipping aggregator and one on a small Delhi drone startup nobody had heard of. Now, four years later, those bets have converged into one of India's fastest-growing logistics categories. Drones are now flying blood samples to hospital labs in 10 minutes instead of four hours. They're cutting delivery costs for D2C brands trying to escape marketplace commissions. They're even moving parcels between dark stores for Zepto. But t...
Jun 21, 2026•18 min•Ep. 776
2026 was the first IPL season after India banned online real money gaming last year. The platforms were gone and the payment gateways were blocked. The government had made its position clear. The betting, however, did not stop. The Ken's Mrunmayee Kulkarni went looking for where it went and found it hiding inside something the government itself built. On platforms like 99 Exchange, gamblers deposit and withdraw money directly through UPI, gambler to gambler, with no mule network and no victim to...
Jun 18, 2026•20 min•Ep. 775
India's southwest monsoon is running 35% below normal. Mumbai's reservoirs are at 12% of capacity. And the rain that should have arrived by June 11th still hasn't. The same water and power systems that keep this economy running are now being asked to power India's AI future too — a $180 billion data centre bet that nobody is stress-testing against a failing monsoon and climate change. The groundwater is already over-extracted. The grid hit an all-time demand record in May. And the choice about w...
Jun 17, 2026•13 min•Ep. 774
Zepto just filed its DRHP. It wants to open 1,900 new dark stores, on top of the 1,139 it already runs. Blinkit, the only profitable player in the sector, is racing to 3,000 stores by March 2027. Meanwhile, its adjusted EBITDA is just Rs. 37 crores — not a lot considering the billions that have been spent on getting it to profitability. The dark store is quick commerce's core bet — and its biggest fixed cost. Rents are rising, FMCG prices are up, and user growth at Zepto actually declined betwee...
Jun 17, 2026•17 min•Ep. 773
India is spending over 10,000 crore rupees building what it calls sovereign AI. The servers are going up in Mumba and the ministers are saying the word at every summit. There is just one problem: nobody has defined what sovereign actually means. And the chips powering all of it are American, subject to American law. A US subpoena can reach a data centre in Mumbai as easily as one in Seattle. In this edition of Make in India Competitive Again , The Ken reporter Mrunmayee Kulkarni delves into what...
Jun 15, 2026•15 min•Ep. 772
Amazon Now launched in September 2025. It was already two years behind Flipkart, and well behind Blinkit and Zepto. Nine months later, it's doing 450,000 to 500,000 orders a day, expanding to 100 cities, and a Blinkit executive is walking through Colaba market, stopping in front of an Amazon dark store in a location Blinkit's expansion head could only dream of. Amazon has something its rivals don't: 150 million Prime members who already shop five times more frequently. And since bundling quick c...
Jun 14, 2026•12 min•Ep. 771
Adani started buying apples in Himachal Pradesh two decades ago. Not because it wanted to be in the fruit business — but because it wanted to own the cold chain that nobody else was building. Now the India-New Zealand free trade agreement is about to test Indian apple growers like never before. New Zealand yields 50 to 70 tonnes per hectare. Himachal Pradesh averages 7 to 8. Adani just expanded into cherries, plums, and peaches — fruits even more perishable than apples. The bet is the same as it...
Jun 12, 2026•14 min•Ep. 770
This week, Nepal sent Indian mango shipments back to the border after inspectors found excessive pesticide residues . A few weeks earlier, Japan had suspended all Indian mango imports after a biosecurity inspection failure at a treatment facility in Uttar Pradesh. Two bans in one season and this was before the war in Iran tripled freight costs and shut the Gulf route entirely. Mirza Ghalib, the famous Urdu poet, famously had just two requirements of a mango — to be sweet and plentiful. This seas...
Jun 10, 2026•12 min•Ep. 769
India just found natural gas off the Andaman coast. The energy minister called it "an ocean of energy opportunities." Considering India's energy vulnerabilities, this is a significant find, even if commercial production is a decade away. Because in the meantime, the war on Iran has doubled LNG prices, cut off Qatar (which supplied nearly half of India's imports) and pushed India into buying six times more American gas than it was before the conflict began. The US has already used energy as a bar...
Jun 10, 2026•14 min•Ep. 768
Every month, millions of Indians pay their LIC premium without a second thought. What they don't realise is that money is quietly buying up India's most beaten-down stocks — the ones foreign investors are dumping, the ones mutual funds won't touch, the ones everyone else is running from. For decades, LIC was the only institution large enough to hold Indian markets together during a sell-off. That role now has company. SIP money has grown into a second pillar of domestic support, and LIC's grip o...
Jun 09, 2026•10 min•Ep. 767
Two million students. One lakh twenty thousand seats. And a paper that leaked before anyone sat down to write it. This is the second NEET leak in two years. The National Testing Agency was created specifically to prevent this. A parliamentary panel had already warned, after last year's controversy, that the NTA was too dependent on private vendors and lacked the institutional capacity to run exams at this scale. The government's response: move the exam online by 2027. But NTA's own tech partners...
Jun 07, 2026•11 min•Ep. 766
Amazon built a leaderboard to track how much AI its engineers were using. Employees gamed it. Costs exploded. Last week, the leaderboard was gone. Uber burned through its entire annual AI budget in four months — after telling staff to use AI "as much as possible." Microsoft cancelled most of its Claude Code licences six months after rolling them out. Three companies, the same couple months, the same lesson: that measuring AI adoption is turning out to be a very different thing from measuring AI ...
Jun 04, 2026•12 min•Ep. 765
Andhra Pradesh wants to be India's data centre capital. Google, Meta, and Reliance have all been promised space in Vizag. To make it work, the state did something it has never done before — handed Google its own electricity licence, letting it bypass the state grid entirely. The logic is straightforward. The consequences are not. When large consumers leave the grid, electricity gets more expensive for everyone else. Farmers lose subsidies. Factories pay more. Coal plants stay open longer than pl...
Jun 04, 2026•25 min•Ep. 764
Anthropic raised $65 billion last week making it the largest funding round in AI history. It also filed for an IPO days later. So did OpenAI and SpaceX after its merger with xAI. Three of the most powerful AI companies in the world are heading to public markets in the same window. They're flush with capital but burning through more than they earn. Meanwhile, the startups that were supposed to be the next wave are being quietly absorbed. The funds that would have backed them are drying up. So wha...
Jun 02, 2026•13 min•Ep. 763
Swiggy CEO Sriharsha Majety told Bloomberg in an interview last week that his company would stay out of the spending war being waged by Amazon, Flipkart, and Reliance in India's quick commerce market. He invoked the Airtel-Jio price war as a precedent, argued that chasing market share through discounts only postpones the problem, and said Swiggy has Rs 15,000 crore in the bank to play the long game. But Swiggy invented this category. And Blinkit, which came years later, now has twice the dark st...
Jun 01, 2026•11 min•Ep. 762
Seventeen foreign universities have set up campuses in India in two years. Most can't fill their seats. And a Rs 1,000 crore scholarship push launched last month is the most visible sign yet that something isn't working. The pitch is this: a western degree without the visa hassle, at Rs 15 to 25 lakh a year, which is roughly what Ashoka and Plaksha charge, but without the research environment or the actual campus. Students who wanted to leave India aren't particularly interested in a single-floo...
Jun 01, 2026•11 min•Ep. 761
India has pumped over $33 billion into BSNL since 2019. But the person running the company finds out every three months if they still have the job.Multiple candidates have been interviewed for the full-time position but no one has been hired yet. The finances have improved in the last two years but the telco's market position has kept sliding. And the decisions that actually matter — where to launch 5G, which markets to chase, what kind of company BSNL even wants to be — are all waiting on a lea...
May 28, 2026•10 min•Ep. 760
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...
May 27, 2026•10 min•Ep. 759
In 1998, a Metal Gear Solid villain named Psycho Mantis read your memory card out loud and made your controller vibrate on its own. Players were stunned. It felt like a genuine invasion. And they loved it. In 2026, Microsoft built an Xbox assistant that could do roughly the same thing. Plus some more. Track your history, read your screen, coach you through the game. Players were stunned. It felt like a genuine invasion. And they hated it. The viral hate train began in March 2026. Two months late...
May 26, 2026•19 min•Ep. 758
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 ...
May 25, 2026•14 min•Ep. 757
Bookmyshow has spent two decades building India's live events business. It organised Coldplay's India tour, controls 70% of online movie ticketing, and has long-term exclusive deals with nearly every major multiplex chain. Then Zomato launched District in August 2024. In its first full year, it quadrupled revenue, edged past Bookmyshow on app downloads, and became the exclusive ticketing partner for half the IPL. It's still losing money. Eternal doesn't seem to mind. Because District isn't tryin...
May 24, 2026•12 min•Ep. 756
On Wednesday, Meta began firing 8,000 people.This makes up 10% of its global workforce. The cuts started at 4am on 20 May, rolling across time zones. People found out by email. Meta's quarterly revenue that same week: $56 billion. It's capex guidance for 2026: up to $145 billion, almost all of it going into AI. This is the current trend in Big Tech: record profits, mass layoffs, redirect to machines, repeat. Then, closer home: Unacademy is being sold to upGrad for $218 million — over 90% below i...
May 21, 2026•11 min•Ep. 755
Adani Group has spent the last decade building India's largest private airport empire. But owning nine airports turned out to be only the beginning. From aircraft maintenance to pilot training to ground handling, the group is now reaching into every corner of the aviation business. Airlines operating at Adani airports are already feeling the squeeze — on pricing, on vendor choice, on the terms of doing business. India has never had a single player control this much of the aviation stack. Are the...
May 21, 2026•11 min•Ep. 754
Virat Kohli's new Meta Oakley ad has 40 million views in two weeks — more than every other athlete in the global campaign, including the one that aired during Superbowl. The tagline says Athletic Intelligence is here. But the ad shows the glasses answering questions, playing music, and recording a slow-motion shot. The athletic part is mostly just Kohli. India's smart wearables market is set to triple by 2033. Fifty million Indians already make health decisions based on what these devices tell t...
May 20, 2026•14 min•Ep. 753
Three weeks before the FIFA World Cup kicks off in the US, India still does not have a broadcaster for the tournament. JioStar offered $20 million. FIFA said no. Sony did not bid at all. A petition has reached the Delhi High Court asking that matches at least air on Doordarshan. The easy explanation is that FIFA got greedy. But that does not explain how the world's biggest sporting event ends up with no takers in a country with more than 300 million football fans. In today's episode, host Snigdh...
May 18, 2026•12 min•Ep. 752
The Indian government just moved two million email accounts off NIC's servers onto Zoho's cloud. The reason the government decided to leave behind a system it had built and run for 40 years? A list of issues; including ransomware attacks, power outages, and even a blackout on a New Year's Eve that knocked out Parliament's website. The fix was a seven-year, 200 crore rupee contract with a private Indian company. Zoho actually scored lower than Google and Microsoft in the government's own assessme...
May 17, 2026•12 min•Ep. 751
