Daybreak

Meet Shaik Salauddin, a 38-year-old cab driver from Hyderabad, who is fighting for the rights of eight million gig workers from across the country.

While India's gig economy is burgeoning, the workers on whose backs it is built barely enjoy any rights or legal protections. Salauddin realised this early on and in 2019, after five years of relentless pursuit, the Indian Federation of App-based Transport Workers (IFAT) was born. With over 25,000 members working for aggregators like Uber, Amazon, and Zomato, through IFAT, Salauddin is redefining the way we look at trade unions. To begin with, the union has no political affiliations. Instead, Salauddin encourages all of its members to understand power structures and approach the right people to drive change.

Thanks to his efforts, two states, Karnataka and Rajasthan, have introduced legislations to protect the rights of gig workers. Others like Kerala are working on their own.

In this episode, hosts Snigdha and Rahel speak to Salauddin himself and to Prof. Vinoj Abraham from Labour Economics at the Centre for Development Studies in Thiruvananthapuram to understand the significance of Salauddin's work and why it is important to protect gig workers.

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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.

A special shout out to Hari Krishna, from the Two by Two team, who kindly agreed to dub parts of this episode. Thank you, Hari!

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In October 2024, the government of India launched the Ayushman Bharat Pradhan Mantri Jan Arogya Yojana, a health insurance coverage for all senior citizens aged 70 and over, regardless of income. This is big news for healthcare in India because for the longest time, this is exactly the age group that has pvt insurance companies have been ignoring.

To give you a clearer picture, a person aged over 60 years pays anything between Rs 30,000–50,000 as annual premium for coverage as low as 5 lakh rupees. Even policies for Rs 6–10 lakh are harder to find and cost Rs 40,000–70,000 annually. That’s about 5X the premium someone younger would pay for the same coverage. And it’s not just the high premiums; these policies are of little help to seniors when they need it the most.

In fact, more than four out of every five people aged above 60 aren’t covered by any insurance at all. Only 20% of those over 45 years have a health cover. And the rest are just out there vulnerable to emergencies. The reason being: high premiums and meagre coverage.

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**This episode was first published in November 2024

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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.

The Ken is hosting its first live subscriber event! Join two long-term and contrarian CEOs, Nithin Kamath of Zerodha and Deepak Shenoy of Capitalmind, as they discuss the mental models, decision making frameworks, and potential outcomes related to a very real possibility: an extended stock market winter that lasts 24 months or more. Click here to buy your tickets.

Last month, Netradyne, the logistics AI startup, became India’s first unicorn of 2025 after it raised 90 million dollars in series D funding.

You see, it did not take it long to realise that its sweet spot is the long-distance trucking segment. It serves over 3,000 customers across eight countries, including the likes of Amazon, Shell, Indian Oil and Greenline Mobility. And it all began with one rather primitive prototype. Of course, now it has morphed into a compact device with a built-in GPU, up to four cameras, and a disembodied voice alerting drivers not to crash the vehicle.

The Ken reporter Abhirami G recently found herself in the backseat of one of Netradyne’s test cars in Bengaluru's Whitefield neighbourhood. The driver of the car was a Netradyne employee. And as he weaved through the traffic, the company’s signature always-on surveillance cameras didn’t just watch his every move, but also apparently “understood” and “analysed”. As he drove, he was generating the precious training data that powers the company’s bread and butter. Apart from making roads safer, this whole system also doubles up as a driver’s best legal defence in times of trouble. The company’s executive Vice president of Engineering Teja Gudena said that on multiple occasions, it has saved drivers from liability by proving their innocence in accidents.

Apart from its new-found unicorn status, it reportedly managed to clock Rs 1,000 crore in revenue in 2023. It also currently has a stronghold in the US and other major global markets. Reaching all of these milestones within nine years is pretty remarkable. But despite all that success, Netradyne is now grappling with an existential crisis. Because now, driverless vehicles are no longer science fiction, they are a logistical inevitability. And that leaves Netradyne in a rather tricky spot.

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For nearly two decades, Abhishek Ganguly worked as the managing director of Puma, the German athleisure brand in India. In that period alone, the brand’s revenue shot up from Rs 20 crore to close to Rs 4,000 crore. Under Ganguly, Puma even managed to beat its longtime rival Adidas to become a market leader.

In 2023, Ganguly decided to quit and start his own venture called Agilitas Sports with two of his colleagues from Puma, Atul Bajaj and Amit Prabhu. Within a year, Ganguly’s company has managed to rack up more than Rs 700 crore in revenue.

The way Ganguly and his co-founders got to this point is interesting. Instead of doing the obvious thing and launching their own sneaker brand, Ganguly did something quite odd. Something, that even the biggest sportswear brands in the world – Nike, Reebok, Adidas – have never even attempted.

Last September, Agilitas bought India’s largest sportswear contract manufacturer, Mochiko shoes. This is the company that manufactures shoes for international brands like Adidas, Puma, New Balance, Skechers, Reebok, Asics, Crocs, Decathlon – the works. Ganguly’s logic behind owning the factory is simple – he wants whole pie and not just a slice of the margin.

He told The Ken's DVLS Pranathi that having the additional manufacturer’s margin in a price-sensitive market like India is worth its weight in gold. But there is a reason giants like Puma and Adidas don’t go down this road—taking care of manufacturing in-house is a logistical nightmare. That’s why most brands outsource to companies that are equipped to do it, like Mochiko.

But Agilitas is dead set on bringing the entire operation in-house. It’s convinced it can work and has also managed to convince VCs that there is merit in controlling both manufacturing and distributing.

Investors are betting on the Ganguly-Bajaj-Prabhu trio to pull off another Puma-sized victory.

But will the other shoe drop?

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**The host mistakenly said a decade instead of two decades when referring to Abhishek Ganguly's stint at Puma. The error is regretted.

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DAYBREAK UNWIND RECCOMENDATIONS FOR COMFORT FOOD SPOTS

Rahel: Kappa Chakka Kandhari, Bangalore,
Unnamed food truck at Utorda Beach, South Goa
Snigdha: Alu Dum from Bari's tuck shop near Loreto Convent, Darjeeling
Thukpa at Kunga's, near Planter's Club, Darjeeling
Ghee Podi Dosa from Umesh Refreshments, Indiranagar, Bangalore

Satyam: Litti Chokha, Jai Mata Di Food Stall, HSR Layout, Bangalore

Shayanika: Dosa and Puliyogare Rice at 3 Trees Cafe, Upper Dharamkot, Dharamsala

Rahul: Egg fried rice at Tenzin Kitchen, Koramangala

Akshaya: Okonomoyaki and fried tofu sushi at Dahlia, Chennai

Remember that time in 2022 when India’s top digital payments companies Phonepe, Paytm*, and Bharatpe were in a no-holds-barred turf war? Looking back, it seemed like there was news almost every other day about some tiff between the three market leaders. In fact, former managing director of Bharatpe, Ashneer Grover, has spoken on record about “street fights” between companies’ employees over QR codes.

A little more than two years later, there’s only calm. QR code scuffles are over. No one is beating each other up.

Both the peer-to-merchant and peer-to-peer payments space have settled down into a tripartite peace. Phonepe, Google Pay, and Paytm—in order of market share—are the clear leaders. This raises some interesting questions: How many UPI apps do you have on your phone? And do you have a favourite one? We may have multiple, but only one of them is ever really used. No amount of cashbacks or fancy user experiences make people want to switch to something else.

Is it brand loyalty that is preventing users from churning out of old platforms and into new ones?

A former Paytm executive told The Ken recently, “There is zero brand loyalty for UPI payments apps...”

Well then, what is happening?

*Paytm founder Vijay Shekhar Sharma is an investor in The Ken

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.