Daybreak

Business news is complex and overwhelming. It doesn’t have to be. Every day of the week, from Monday to Friday, Daybreak tells one business story that’s significant, simple and powerful. Hosted from The Ken’s newsroom by Snigdha Sharma and Rachel Varghese, Daybreak relies on years of original reporting and analysis by some of India’s most experienced and talented business journalists.

Last refreshed: June 11th, 2026 at 12:13 PM

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Episodes

India's mango paradox

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

Analysts say gas prices are about to crash. India still can't afford to celebrate

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

LIC has lost its throne to SIPs. It’s still the smartest investor in the room

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

NEET’s switch from pen-and-paper to computer: damned if you do, damned if you don’t

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

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