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 five Maruti cars sold last year ran on the fuel.

But a stopgap is still just a stopgap.

Tune in.

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 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 accuracy.

This is a read aloud of Debanjali's original story, by Rachel Varghese, on Daybreak.

📖 Read the full story on The Ken: This startup ranked AI models. They all landed in the danger zone

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 world.

So what exactly does Rs 100 crore buy you in India's policy ecosystem?

Also listen to: Friday Roundup: Adani goes nuclear and AI's talent exit