When a public electric bus breaks down in India, three agencies get notified.

None of them can actually fix it.

The buses don't belong to the cities that run them. The contracts sit with central agencies. The warranties belong to manufacturers.

When a four-year-old bus stalls because its battery management system glitched, the city logs a complaint, calculates a fine for the manufacturers, and takes the bus off the route. Commuters are left slim pickings.

And India's about to deploy thousands more using the same model.

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 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 new 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 centre push fits into that reality, drawing lessons from cities abroad where similar tensions have already surfaced.

So as India builds for a digital future, the question is simple: who decides how much water that future can afford?

Sam Altman called ads a "last resort" in late 2024. That day has arrived.

OpenAI just announced ChatGPT is running ads—personalised ones based on your conversations. The company spent $8 billion in 2025 alone with zero profit, and an essay predicted they'll burn through cash by 2027.

Meanwhile, Google's Gemini is betting on staying ad-free, preserving user trust while ChatGPT strains it.

We break down the enshittification playbook, why OpenAI's "code red" memo signals desperation, and whether ads can actually save a company hemorrhaging billions.

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.