Across India, many heirs are stepping away from running their inherited businesses to run family offices instead. They see investing as more flexible, more global, and less tied to daily operations.Their parents built factories but they are more interested in managing portfolios.

It’s a practical shift but one that’s changing how old wealth works and what it values.

What’s driving this change and does India’s next generation of uber-rich business owners still want to build anything at all?

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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.

In late January, a plane crash in Maharashtra killed the state's deputy chief minister, Ajit Pawar.

It also exposed something few had been paying attention to: India's booming private charter industry, where demand is surging, corners are being cut, and the regulator is struggling to keep pace.

There are now over 430 non-scheduled aircraft in the country. The top operator alone has 17 planes and 70-plus pilots. But between periodic audits, years-long crash investigations, and operators who'd rather fly with a broken light than lose a booking — the cycle of crash, probe, and forget has a way of repeating itself.

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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.

Private equity has been buying up some of India's most prestigious schools. The pitch: better governance, professional management, and much-needed capital for a struggling sector.

But inside some of these acquisitions, something else is happening. Teacher training budgets are shrinking. Salaries are stagnating. And in at least one case, a school is paying 65% of its revenue in rent — to a landlord owned by the same firm that owns the school.

Some investors have made it work. Others have changed something harder to measure.

In this episode, hosts Snigdha Sharma and Rachel Varghese speak to The Ken reporters Valli Vikram and Mutasim Khan about how private-equity firms squeeze money out of schools and what that does to them.

Read the stories here:
Private equity’s priority for Indian schools: pickleball courts over teacher training by Valli Vikram
The private-equity handbook for turning non-profit schools into cash cows by Mutasim Khan

If you have any thoughts on this episode write to us at podcasts@the-ken.com with Daybreak in the subject line. You can also leave us a comment on our website or the YouTube channel here.

Disclosure: Reporter Valli Vikram comes from a family that previously owned a school acquired partially by International Schools Partnership (ISP)

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.

This week, on Tuesday, India announced a sweeping overhaul of how it calculates GDP, fixing a measurement system the IMF had flagged as outdated just last November. It includes a new base year, better price data, and a wider net to count the informal economy. The number seems to be getting closer to reality.

But that raises a harder question.

For a country that has built its global identity around being the world's fastest growing major economy, what happens when the arithmetic changes? And does any of it actually reach 1.4 billion people?

Host Snigdha Sharma explores.

Tune in.

If you have any thoughts on this episode write to us at podcasts@the-ken.com with Daybreak in the subject line. You can also leave us a comment on our website or the YouTube channel 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.

The next frontier of AI isn't in your phone. It's supposed to be around your neck, on your face, in your ear and out in the world with you.

Tech companies have spent billions on that pitch. The generation they were counting on to buy it coined the term "hammerbait" instead.

Today: the wearable AI moment, what it gets wrong, and the one version of this technology that might actually be worth wanting.

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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.

China’s stock market has delivered strong returns over the past year and a half. It has outperformed the US, which has long been the preferred global market for Indian investors. Even now, Chinese valuations appear relatively reasonable.

But Indian investors face limited access. Only two mutual fund schemes currently accept fresh investments in Chinese stocks.

Even if more options open up, experts advise restraint. The rally is tempting but experts warn investors from getting carried away.

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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.

Hosur built India's EV industry. Now it's running out of room — and a city many haven't heard of (mainly because it used to be Aurangabad) is quietly filling the gap.

Sambhajinagar doesn't have Silicon Valley-style VC money or flashy government announcements. But what it does have is something harder to manufacture: a generational automotive ecosystem of factory owners, built over decades, now scaling up for an electric future.

Toyota noticed. And Ather. And JSW. This is the story of how a small city in Maharashtra became the surprising centre of India's next industrial bet.

If you have any thoughts on this episode write to us at podcasts@the-ken.com with Daybreak in the subject line. You can also leave us a comment on our website or the YouTube channel 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 hosted the world's biggest AI summit this week — 100+ nations, $200 billion in commitments, and enough billionaire handshakes to fill a highlight reel.
But beneath the spectacle lies a sharper question: when will it be India’s turn to build AI, instead of just buying into it? Snigdha breaks down the gap between infrastructure ambition and intelligence sovereignty.

In other news, Mark Zuckerberg walked into a US courtroom as Meta, YouTube, TikTok and Snapchat face a landmark trial.
The allegation? That teen addiction wasn't an unfortunate byproduct of the way social media works — it was built into the product. Rachel explains why this case could change everything.

If you have any thoughts on this episode write to us at podcasts@the-ken.com with Daybreak in the subject line. You can also leave us a comment on our website or the YouTube channel 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.