Jio Studios is now the largest production house in India by revenue, catalogue, and box-office share. It got there fast. Stree 2, Laapataa Ladies, Dhurandhar, all Jio. The Dhurandhar franchise alone is closing in on Rs 3,000 crore worldwide. Meanwhile, Dharma, Excel, Maddock, and Bhansali have all sold significant stakes just to stay in the game. Jio simply does not need to. It has Reliance's telecom network, streaming platform, and marketing muscle all working together. The studio model that Bo...
May 14, 2026•10 min•Ep. 750
Gen Z was supposed to be AI's most enthusiastic adopters. For a while, they were. Then the hiring froze, the jobs disappeared, and the tools got good enough to make the question uncomfortably personal. Excitement about AI among Gen Z is down 15% since last year. Anger is up 9%. But the more interesting story isn't the sentiment shift — it's what's happening underneath it. Writing skills degrading without anyone noticing. Complacency creeping in. A generation becoming, in one colleague's words, m...
May 13, 2026•22 min•Ep. 749
Air India’s board met in Mumbai last week to discuss cost cuts, CEO succession, and whether to start charging business class passengers separately for meals and lounge access. The airline is projecting losses exceeding ₹22,000 crore for the financial year just ended, nearly double the year before. Campbell Wilson is stepping down as CEO. International flights are being cut by over 20%. Jet fuel costs are up 63% since the war on Iran began. But the crisis arrived at an airline already deep in tro...
May 12, 2026•10 min•Ep. 748
On a Wednesday morning in April, The Ken's Mrunmayee Kulkarni went to Rushikonda beach in Visakhapatnam looking for a manhole. She found it — a concrete chamber with a reinforced lid, no armed guard, no exclusion zone, no legal protection. In a few years, it will be one of the landing points for the world's longest undersea cable. 95% of India's internet — every payment, every message, a $341 billion services economy — runs through cables like this. The nearest repair ship is in Singapore. There...
May 11, 2026•27 min•Ep. 747
India's carmakers are staring down a deadline. In less than a year, new emission norms will require them to dramatically cut their carbon output — or pay hundreds of millions of dollars in fines. Electric vehicles were supposed to be the answer. But the batteries aren't ready, the infrastructure isn't there, and adoption has been slower than anyone predicted. So the industry has quietly pivoted to an unlikely stopgap: CNG. Tata, Maruti, and Hyundai are all betting on it. In fact, two in every fi...
May 10, 2026•12 min•Ep. 746
India's best AI models are confidently wrong. Not occasionally — structurally. If you put two unrelated ideas into a prompt, the model will usually invent a connection rather than admit that none exists. In this piece, The Ken's Debanjali Biswas traces what a five-month study of leading AI models — from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google — actually found about how they reason. The results landed almost every model in what researchers are calling the "danger zone", which shows high confidence and low ...
May 07, 2026•12 min•Ep. 745
A two-year-old think tank backed by Adani just got 14 of its suggestions, some of them word for word, written into a law passed by Parliament. That law opened India's nuclear sector to private players for the first time in history. Months later, Adani floated a new subsidiary to enter the same field. The think tank is called Chintan Research Foundation. It started in a South Delhi cafe. It calls itself independent. And it's now one of the more visible and contested players in Delhi's policy worl...
May 06, 2026•11 min•Ep. 744
The Parle-G packet has cost five rupees since the 1990s. Once, when the company tried raising it by 50 paise, consumers switched to Britannia's Tiger within weeks. The price was rolled back. That's how sensitive this market is. But something else has been changing — quietly, and without announcement. The packet that was once 100 grams is now 45. And Parle-G isn't alone. Dabur, Britannia, Nestlé, Godrej — all cutting weight, all in the same quarter, all for the same reason. A war in West Asia has...
May 05, 2026•10 min•Ep. 743
West Bengal and Tamil Nadu declared their results yesterday. BJP swept Bengal after fifteen years of TMC rule. In Tamil Nadu, Vijay's TVK won, upending the DMK return almost everyone had predicted, including the platforms that had money on it. Prediction markets are now a $150 billion industry. And they were taking live bets on India's assembly elections, on a platform India officially banned last year. In a recent edition of The Ken's Make In India Competitive Again , Seema Singh wrote about an...
May 04, 2026•12 min•Ep. 742
Market shocks hit retirees harder than anyone else. For those just retired or on the verge of it, a sharp early drop in portfolio value can cause damage that compounds quietly over decades, long after markets recover. The American war in Iran is the latest trigger. And it may not be the last. The good news: careful planning can offset the risk. A concept called the safe withdrawal rate, used correctly, can be the difference between a corpus that lasts 30 years and one that runs out in 20. Tune i...
May 04, 2026•10 min•Ep. 741
In November 2024, one of India's biggest FMCG companies, Hindustan Unilever, started getting a barrage of complaints from its consumers, who said they were seeing the same Dove and Surf Excel ads repeatedly on OTT platforms during a single watch session. Some of them were shown the same ads as many as 150 times within a week. With IPL around the corner, HUL — which spends nearly Rs 4,000 crore on ads annually — couldn't afford to ignore these complaints. So what followed was a series of investig...
Apr 30, 2026•18 min•Ep. 740
Investors are calling India's home-services market quick commerce's next big moment. Instahelp, Snabbit, and Pronto are betting big on it. They're sending trained workers to your door in under 10 minutes, at prices cheaper than a coffee. Orders, naturally, are in the millions. But the difference is that quick commerce eventually figured out how to make money. Here, on the other hand, 82% of consumers have already said they won't pay more than Rs 200 an hour. And on every order placed today, the ...
Apr 29, 2026•11 min•Ep. 739
Diet Coke disappeared from Bangalore's shelves, and a teenager's frustrated Reddit post accidentally explained why: the Strait of Hormuz. When the US-Israel war on Iran began in February, fuel shipments slowed. Aluminium furnaces went cold. PET resin prices jumped 75%. At least 25 plants shut completely. In one Odisha industrial belt alone, 700 of 1,500 workers lost their jobs. But the war only made an existing problem worse — India had already tightened import rules on aluminium cans, leaving b...
Apr 28, 2026•10 min•Ep. 738
Last week, Rihanna was all over our social media feeds as she flew to Mumbai for the official India launch of Fenty Beauty. Now it is exclusively available through Reliance Retail's beauty company, Tira. This was the popstar's second visit to India in two years; the first being a private performance at Anant Ambani's pre-wedding celebrations in 2024, her first paid show in eight years. For a woman who built her entire brand on never showing up on anyone else's terms, there's something worth exam...
Apr 27, 2026•14 min•Ep. 737
At Kochi's Infopark, two models of the IT industry sit 500 metres apart. Infosys and Wipro: sprawling campuses, thousands of engineers, margins built on scale. IBM: a smaller hub, senior-heavy teams, focused on enterprise AI. Same city, completely different bets on the future. India's IT giants are expanding into tier-2 cities because they're cheaper. But AI is quietly making the old logic — hire more, deliver at scale — look like the wrong answer. Infosys and Wipro's stocks have nearly halved s...
Apr 26, 2026•12 min•Ep. 736
Lightrock arrived in India with nearly a billion dollars and royal backing — the Liechtenstein dynasty's centuries-old fortune funding bets on around 40 growth-stage startups. The firm moved fast, doubled down on existing investments more aggressively than most peers, and scaled hard during the zero-interest-rate boom. Then the cycle turned. Its portfolio — Waycool, Pharmeasy, Dunzo — ran into trouble. New cheques dried up. Lightrock shifted from investor to caretaker, managing what it had rathe...
Apr 24, 2026•10 min•Ep. 735
You pick up an unknown number. A bubbly voice starts selling you a credit card. You hang up in seconds. Except now, that voice may not be human. AI voice agents are already live across banks, e-commerce and healthcare platforms in India, with startups in the space raising over Rs 280 crore. But behind that perfectly polite pitch is a more complex rollout — from pilots and script tuning to adapting across languages and dialects. So, what’s driving this sudden funding spree, and how are companies ...
Apr 22, 2026•23 min•Ep. 734
A study gave 16 experienced developers the best AI coding tools available. They predicted they'd be 24% faster. They felt 20% faster. They were actually 19% slower — and still didn't believe it when told. That gap between belief and reality is now being deployed at enterprise scale. TCS, Infosys, Wipro, and Cognizant have committed to over 50,000 AI coding licences each. Bugs per developer are up 50%. Code is reaching production without any human review. And the senior engineers who could catch ...
Apr 22, 2026•19 min•Ep. 733
Seventeen years ago, Reliance Industries made a promise that was supposed to change India's energy future. It didn't. Today, with a war raging in the Middle East, the Strait of Hormuz mostly closed, and Qatar — India's single largest gas supplier — unable to guarantee supplies, that broken promise has become a full-blown crisis. India finds itself caught between Trump, Tehran, and its own structural failures. The IEA calls it the worst energy crisis in history. For India, it may be the moment th...
Apr 20, 2026•14 min•Ep. 732
When your SIP bounces, your bank charges you Rs 500. The mutual fund that missed the investment? Charges you nothing. That gap is not an accident. In this piece, The Ken's Mutasim Khan traces how India's banks have quietly turned missed SIP debits into a revenue line — one that costs them roughly Rs 25 to process, and nets them hundreds of crores a month. The people paying most are first-time investors in smaller cities, often unaware the charge even happened. This is a read aloud of Mutasim's o...
Apr 19, 2026•17 min•Ep. 731
India's life expectancy has doubled since 1950. But 65% of deaths are still from diseases caught too late. Cent, the new startup from Practo's founder, thinks it has an answer: full-body AI scans that find risks before they become diagnoses. At Rs 20,000–30,000 a scan, it's already found critical findings in hundreds of patients — with zero false positives, it claims. But Cent doesn't diagnose. It doesn't refer. And it has no proprietary technology. So what exactly are you paying for — and what ...
Apr 17, 2026•12 min•Ep. 730
Anthropic has spent years building a reputation as the AI company that actually cares about safety. Then, in the span of two weeks, it leaked an unannounced model, exposed its own source code, and accidentally handed hackers a blueprint of its most widely-used product. The fix came in 24 hours. The blueprint can't be unlearned. And the companies that trusted Claude Code with their deepest systems are still running on publicly documented defences. If the most careful AI company couldn't prevent t...
Apr 15, 2026•17 min•Ep. 729
The Indian government approved a ₹41,534 crore fertiliser subsidy for the upcoming kharif season last week, a 12% increase from last year. The move comes as the Gulf War has severely disrupted India's fertiliser supply chains, with urea prices jumping 65% in just 40 days. India is the world's second largest fertiliser importer, and the Strait of Hormuz carries a significant share of both the finished fertilisers and the gas needed to make them domestically. The kharif season, which produces roug...
Apr 14, 2026•13 min•Ep. 728
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 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 ce...
Apr 13, 2026•13 min•Ep. 727
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 cha...
Apr 13, 2026•13 min•Ep. 726
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 mon...
Apr 09, 2026•35 min•Ep. 725
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 igno...
Apr 08, 2026•17 min•Ep. 724
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: cancellation...
Apr 08, 2026•13 min•Ep. 723
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. Tune in. Daybreak is p...
Apr 06, 2026•15 min•Ep. 722
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 vagu...
Apr 05, 2026•12 min•Ep. 721
