Daybreak - The Ken: Stories that shaped 2025

Episode Date: December 23, 2025

In this episode, we bring you two reported stories from The Ken's newsroom that stayed with us this year. The first, reported by Nuha Bubere, looks at Flipkart at a moment of pressure and at how its CEO Kalyan Krishnamurthy is running the company as competition intensifies and expectations remain high. In the second, Atul Krishna tells us about India’s decision to allow foreign universities to set up campuses in the country, and what that shift says about the state of higher education and public capacity. You can find more of our best work from 2025 at the-ken.com.

Hi, this is Rohan Dharma Kumar. If you've heard any of the Ken's podcasts, you've probably heard me, my interruptions, my analogies, and my contrarian takes on most topics. And you might rightly be wondering why am I interrupting this episode too? It's for a special announcement. For the last few months, I and Sita Raman Ganeshan, my colleague and the Ken's deputy editor, have been working on an ambitious new podcast. It's called Intermission.

We want to tell the secret sauce stories of India's greatest companies. Stories of how they were born, how they fought to survive, how they build their organizations and culture, how they manage to innovate and thrive over decades, and most importantly, how they're poised today. To do that, Sita and I have been reading books, poring over reports, going through financial statements, digging up archives, and talking to dozens of people. And if that wasn't enough, we also decided to throw in video into the mix. Yes, you heard that right. Intermission has also had to find its footing in the world of multi-camera shoots in professional studios, laborious editing, and extensive post-production.

Sita and I are still reeling from the intensity of our first studio recording. Intermission launches on March 23rd. To get alert, as soon as we release our first video. episode, please follow intermission on Spotify and Apple Podcast or subscribe to the Ken's YouTube channel. You can find all of the links at the ken.com slash I am. With that, back to your episode. At the Ken, very often, the stories that we find ourselves coming back to again and again are the ones where something important is shifting, but the outcome is not clear yet. And they usually begin with something familiar. It could be a company.

under pressure or a policy decision meant to solve a long-standing problem. But once you start reporting, you realize that the effects of those decisions are still playing out and will likely shape what comes next. With the end of the year around the corner, I thought I would tell you about two such stories from our newsroom with perspectives from our reporters who wrote them. The first one is about Flipkart and about Kalyan Krishnamorti, the company's longtime CEO. Flipkart still plays a sense. central role in Indian e-commerce and decisions taken under Krishna-Murti's leadership matter well beyond the company. It affects sellers, it affects competitors and the general direction of the market itself.

So for this story, my colleague Noha Buberi spent several months reporting on Flipkart, speaking with current and former executives to understand how the company is being run at the moment when its position is under strain. What emerged is not a single turning point, but a picture of sustained pressure both inside the organization and around it. And in the second story, my colleague, the Ken reporter Adul Krishna, looked at what happens when India opens its higher education system to foreign universities and why institutions from abroad are suddenly racing to set up campuses here. This shift in policy to allow foreign institutions to come to India comes at a time when the country's public higher education system has been struggling to keep pace with demand.

Of course, the move is going to bring global institutions, capital and capacity to the country. But it also reflects a choice by the state. And it is very telling to rely on outside players to fill a gap in education infrastructure while allowing those institutions to take profits back home. Welcome to Daybreak, a business podcast from the Ken. I'm your host, Nick Dachshed. Sharma and I don't chase the news cycle. Instead, every day of the week, my colleague Rachel Varghees and I will come to you with one business story that is worth understanding and worth your time.

Today is Wednesday the 24th of December. First, we're going to talk about Noha story where she's shown the spotlight on one of the most powerful and most mysterious figures in Indian e-commerce. Kalyan Krishmurty, the CEO of Flipkart. Once India's greatest e-commerce hope, Flipkart today is. feels stuck. Meanwhile, its owner, Walmart, is actually doing pretty well, beating Amazon globally and minting money from ads. Flipcott in India, though, is still chasing profitability, still trying to reorganize

and still putting out fires. And the CEO, once hailed as a wartime general, is now facing a very different kind of a battle. Noha's reporting shows a company under sustained pressure where decisions travel fast and the margin for error is very, very narrow. So senior leaders are leaving, the morale is shaken and few inside the company believe that the end game is anywhere inside. One executive even told me like, you know, if imagine Flipkart as a person, so you would

just like, you know, see a confused, a distracted kind of an individual in front of you. That word that she used, confused, keeps coming up in this story. Because Flipkart is being squeezed from every side. Misho owns small town India, Amazon dominates the metros, and the quick commerce race belongs to Zeptow Blinket and Instamot. Flipkarts somehow missed the moment, and that pressure landed squarely on one man. As Noah discovered through her reporting, every morning Kalyan Krishnamurti makes six phone calls. No small talk, just numbers. I found out every morning Kalyan Krishnamurti wakes up and he makes six phone calls.

And one by one, this would be like, you know, key executive. inside the company. So he starts off with Heman Padri in supply chain. Then Sakeh Chaudhry in finance. Then we have Kunal Gupta from fashion. Kabir Biswas, who heads the quick commerce vertical from there for Flipcard, which is Flipkart Minutes. Then Ajay Adav in mobiles and Ravi Krishnan in product, who has now left the company actually. And like, you know, it's not chit-chat or it's not like, you know, just catching up with them early morning. But it's about numbers. It's about deliverables. it's about what each of these verticals are doing. This is Krishna-Murti in full wartime mode,

obsessive, omnipresent and deeply skeptical. For example, if bookings on clear trip, which was acquired by Flipcott fall, he does not trust the explanation. He calls competitors himself. But wartime leadership has a cost because wars need more generals and Flipkart seems to be running out of them.

So earlier in May, Ankit Jain, who used to head grocery and large supply chain for Flipkart, he left to join the rival Instamart or Swiggy. Then we saw like an exodus of people right from HR to business operations to people across, like, you know, verticals in Flipkart leaving. And if I have to like, you know, sum it all up, this would be the third major leadership shakeup for Flipkart in, say, six months. The timing also is very like, a very, it's an ill timing for the company in a way because right now they want people to stay,

they want their different verticals to become profitable because the IPO is something which, like, you know, they want to be done with in the next year. And for that, they need a stable leadership. They need people who have seen different turns of Flipcard, people who were there with Kaliang, right, like, you know, when he became the CEO back in 2019, which is not happening now because people themselves don't believe in the company as such and they are leaving. The, the of Kalyan Krishna-Mutti are leaving one by one. This is why inside Flipkart, expectations remain sky-high, even though outside the market has changed.

And that gap is exhausting people. Krishnamurti is not a distant corner of a CEO. He sits on the open floor right across the teams always within reach. An executive told Noha that essentially Krishna is a finance guy. Everything is tracked, metrified and compared to plan. And if numbers slip, he gets deeply involved. That is when teams feel the pressure. Former executives say that accountability intensified after 2022.

Reviews became sharper and targets stayed aggressive even when categories were slowing down. And when growth did not come organically, FlipCard leaned on acquisitions like clear trip for travel, Sastas Sundar for pharmacy and shopsy for social commerce. None of them really worked. Clear Trip alone has lost over 800 crore rupees last year. And then there is the one bet that Flipkart never fully made, QuickCommerce. While Zepto and Blinket doubled orders, Flipkart hesitated.

Insiders say that leadership admitted the company was not ready to execute quick commerce at scale. And by the time, Flipkart launched minutes, Walmart had a new message. Cut cash burn fast. Expansion paused and growth slowed. So Kalyan as a leader has always been someone who relies on his second in command. And like, you know, during trouble times, he deploys his trusted lieutenants across, like, you know, these businesses which he sees struggling. One of them, like, you know, is Smriti Ravichandran, who as one also defined or described her is a sharpshooter.

And she was ping ponged, like, you know, from grocery to mobiles to appliances. Whenever Kalian feels like, oh, this core business for Flipkart is failing, she has gone around and, like, you know, tried to. to change that and stabilize the company. But what we're seeing now is a lot of these trusted executors for Kaliang who he could just like, you know, shift around are also reducing a number. We had Arif Mohamed from Fashion who is now left. He's at Angel 1. Then among others, the main ones, like Amitya Shah is now at rival Instamart where he's like,

you know, the CEO there. We have Ayyapen who has left Clear Trip and now he's, started his own company. So we are seeing like, you know, even in trouble times when Flipcard needs leadership to step up, the most loyal ones are just like leaving or running away from the battlefield. Basically, anything built outside the company's core business struggled. There was pressure to grow, but there was no clear part. Discounts became the only lever and even that stopped working. So where does that leave Kalyan Krishnamuti? Interestingly, nobody that knows, who has spoke to said that he should be fired.

Most still call him Flipkart's strongest crisis leader. But crises have changed. Back in 2016, Flipkart had one enemy, Amazon. Today, the threats are everywhere. Which is why wartime leadership alone may no longer be enough for Flipkart. There are a lot more interesting details in Noha's profile of Kiliang Krishnamurti and her story on flip card, do check out the link in the show notes of this episode. And now on to the next story from our newsroom. In December 2020, India rewrote one line of policy and changed global higher

education in the country forever. Foreign universities were now allowed to open campuses in India. And they could take their profits home. Here's what Atul, who reported on this story, had to say. It's not all the universities, let's say not Oxford's or the Cambridge of the world, but other universities have seen a lot of growth from these international students coming in because they pay a fees that is much higher than what a local student pays. So in a way, the Indian students and the South Asian students, they subsidize one education for their local students and other it funds research in these spaces.

where funding has been less. So they've grown to be reliant on these students. Within weeks, these universities from UK, Australia, were calling lawyers to hash out the details of setting up in India. States across India began competing, offering land partnerships and incentives. Maharashtra announced plans for an edu city. Tamil Nadu, Telangana, Kranataka, Haryana, all of them wanted in. Because hosting a foreign university is not just about education.

It is about status. It is about signaling openness and most importantly, it is about money. In fact, one British institution decided not to wait. They moved immediately and what followed was the fastest university built that you've probably never heard of. The approval to set up Southampton University in India came in January 2024. By July 2025, lectures were already underway. 18 months from paperwork to students in classes.

You see, nearly 2 million Indian students are studying abroad right now, which is how every year billions of rupees leave the country in tuition fee in rent and living costs. But as we know, that route, I mean study abroad, work abroad, has become harder. Post-study work visas are shrinking, immigration rules in UK, Canada and the US have tightened. Canada alone rejected nearly 80% of Indian student visa applications this year. Which is why universities are trying to figure out what's next. They're trying to adapt. And the policy change in India came right in time.

If students can't come to you, you go to them. There was initially sort of a gold rush of saying this is the first sort of UK university to be set up in India, first international university to be set up in India. So they've really focused on the marketing of that in that sense. So creating that narrative has been the most important for these universities coming here. But there is more to it. Some of the administrators have admitted that they were not prepared to open immediately. But they were forced to because the decision was that you were to get in there first, fix things later.

When the policy was first floated by the government, it spoke about allowing the world's top universities in, the top 100. But by the time the rules finally landed, that bar had slipped to the top 500. Officials explained this to Atul by saying that this is just a stepping stone that elite institutions will follow. So far, they haven't. And India has been quite generous. Foreign universities do not have to follow many of the rules that Indian institutions do. They can keep their own formats as long as they offer the same degree

that they offer back home. For example, on paper, an MBA or analytics degree in Gurgao looks identical to the one in UK or Australia. But a university is more than just a syllabus, I'm sure you'll agree. So when you set up a university in India, a university in, let's say, GIF city,

which is an industrial area, and it's just a building with no playground, or no cultural activities or sports activities, it's just not the same as to what it is there in the UK or Australia. So, and the faculties are different. Most of the faculty are being employed from India. This might be people who have studied abroad and all of that. But a faculty and the academic atmosphere makes the university.

And you can't just supplant that easily. and you can't do that in a year and you can't do that in a rush. And that exposes the uncomfortable truth at the heart of this experiment. For many students, studying abroad was never just about education. It was about aspiration. A foreign campus in India can offer a British curriculum, but it will not give students a British work permit. And that is the trade-off that India may succeed in keeping more money at home

and states may gain prestige and investment and universities may find new markets, but for students, the promise feels altered. Something gained, but also a lot lost. So in this race to import global education, are we really building knowledge, or is it just a new kind of a business? So, dear listeners, as this year comes to a close,

these were the kind of stories that we kept returning to. Not because they offer easy conclusions, but because they capture moments where decisions were still unfolding and the consequences were fully not visible yet. The Flipcard story and the one on foreign universities are just two examples of the reporting that we spent the most time on this year.

You can find more of our best work from 2025 on the Ken's website, stories that dig into companies, policy and power and try to make sense of what is changing. Thank you for tuning in and catch you in the next episode. produced from the newsroom of the Ken, India's first subscriber-focused business news platform. What you're listening to is just a small sample of a subscriber-only offerings and a full subscription offers daily, long-form feature stories, newsletters and a whole bunch of

premium podcasts. To subscribe, head to the Ken.com and click on the red subscribe button on the top of the website. Today's episode was hosted and produced by my colleague, Snitha Sharma, and edited by Rajiv Cien.