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 trouble.

In today’s episode, we look at what was happening inside the Tata turnaround long before the war on Iran began.

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.

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 is no protection law. And 60% of that traffic runs through a war zone.

What happens if something goes wrong?

Tune in.

Read Mrunmayee's story here.

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 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

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 sent packaging costs up by 40 to 75%. The buffer won't last. What comes next?

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.

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 interesting research paper. While most assume the trading volumes were not high enough for concern, this peer-reviewed paper in Science says otherwise. In fact, this it says, it matters even when the volumes are thin, or maybe especially then.

So what is India's ban actually achieving?

Tune in.

Also listen to: India banned online betting. Polymarket is wagering on our elections anyway.

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 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.