Hey folks!

It’s a Sunday. And Sundays are for resting, relaxing and having some fun. So imagine you’re in no mood to cook and want to order something yummy for lunch. Naturally, the first thing that comes to mind is biryani. You place an order on your preferred delivery app and wait, all hungry, for it to arrive.

Today, a delivery partner on a bike or scooter zooms through traffic to get it to your doorstep. But someday, it could be a drone. It could hover a few metres above your balcony or backyard and lower your biryani down on a string.

We know this sounds a bit too futuristic. But it’s already taking shape in the US. This week, we read about a US-based company called Matternet, which plans to start its drone delivery service in 2027 by partnering with food chain Dave’s Hot Chicken. Each drone will be able to carry up to 11 pounds (about 5 kg) and make around four to five deliveries an hour.

That got us thinking. If there’s one country where this idea could really take off, it’s India. Because we have the world’s most fascinating delivery army. NITI Aayog estimates that India has over 1 crore gig workers, and that number could double by 2030.

At the same time, our demand for getting things quickly, whether through quick commerce or e-commerce, is only increasing. And companies like Gurugram-based Skye Air have already completed nearly 3.6 million drone deliveries, including 7 minute deliveries in Gurugram and Bengaluru.

Put all of this together, and drones could be useful for delivering things like food and medicines quickly, without getting stuck at traffic signals. There’s also a financial incentive. New labour codes require aggregators to contribute 1% to 2% of their annual revenue towards a social security fund for gig workers.

So does that mean our scooter and bike delivery partners are doomed and drones would eventually wipe them out?

Well, despite that seeming like a possibility, it may not really happen. Sure, drones can take over the long, traffic-filled part of the journey, but they can’t necessarily deliver straight to your doorstep. They’ll likely drop the package at a designated location or nearby pod, after which humans will still take over the last mile — walking a few metres, finding the right building or calling you when the location pin is wrong.

Besides, even if companies want to shift some costs from gig workers to drones, drones aren’t free either. They need batteries, charging docks, maintenance and regulatory approvals.

So faster drone deliveries may not be about erasing the gig economy. It could simply be about figuring out where humans and machines or a combination of both make the most economic sense.

Which means even if your next biryani arrives from the sky, there could still be someone taking the stairs or the lift to say, “Hello ma’am/sir, here’s your order.”

Here’s a soundtrack to put you in the mood… 🎵

Parvaaz by Farak

You can thank our reader, Khushi Singh for this rec.

If you want your recommendations featured in our Sunday editions too, send them our way. Especially hidden gems from underrated Indian artists that many of us may not have discovered yet.

Ready to roll?

What caught our eye this week

Have Ekta Kapoor’s TV serials empowered Indian women?

Would you ever imagine that something as ordinary as a cable TV connection could really change how women saw their lives?

We’re asking because we recently stumbled upon a rather strange but fascinating research paper by economists Robert Jensen and Emily Oster. It tracked 2,700 rural households across five Indian states between 2001 and 2003, comparing villages that got cable TV with those that didn’t.

And the changes they observed after cable arrived were pretty striking.

To begin with, television may have expanded the idea of what was “normal” for a woman. It opened a window to a world that could look very different from the one many rural women had known all their lives. And that makes sense because popular TV serials were often set in cities, with characters who were more educated, married later and sometimes ran businesses or held positions of authority. So rural viewers were suddenly seeing women who worked outside the home or had a say in family decisions. And perhaps that made those possibilities easier to imagine in their own lives.

And these changing norms may then have spilled into everyday bargaining at home. The study suggests that after cable arrived, women were less likely to say that domestic violence was acceptable, showed less preference for sons and reported greater autonomy over things like healthcare, household purchases and even something as basic as visiting friends or relatives. The study also found lower fertility and higher school enrolment among younger girls. So on some of these measures, cable narrowed the gap between rural and urban women by 45–70%.

But the most interesting part of the paper is where it mentions Ekta Kapoor’s Kyunki Saas Bhi Bahu Thi as one of the most popular shows of the time. For the uninitiated, it’s a Hindi TV serial whose original run ran from 2000 to 2008, right through the period when cable TV was spreading rapidly.

And this actually made us wonder: can we really draw a straight line from cable TV to women’s empowerment?

Because if you’re a millennial, you probably remember the template that these TV serials followed. The typical 2000s soap was built around the joint family, with women often shown as dutiful wives and daughters in law. K-serials (a popular nickname for Ekta Kapoor’s shows) no doubt put women at the centre of the story. But their power was often tied to marriage, family and self-sacrifice.

Another catch here is that the study doesn’t show that cable made women earn more, get jobs or gain financial independence. It only captures changes in social attitudes and household autonomy.

In fact, a follow up study by economists Vegard Iversen and Richard Palmer-Jones ten years later found that while many of the paper’s original results held up, there was no significant effect among women with no education, who in fact made up about 54% of the sample that Jensen and Oster surveyed. 

So perhaps saying that cable TV “empowered women” is a bit too far fetched here. It may have done something more subtle like changing the reference points against which people judged their lives. And may have also made a different future easier to imagine.

But whether that imagination turns into jobs, money or genuine freedom depends on what changes in the real world outside the TV screen. What do you think?

Readers Recommend

This week, one of the stories we covered was about how hospitals actually make money. In response to that, one of our readers, Harshit Nayyar, recommends reading Games Hospitals Play by Abantika Ghosh.

It’s an investigation into how India’s private healthcare system works behind the scenes, from inflated bills and unnecessary tests to surgery pricing, hospital packages and insurance. It also explains why healthcare can become so expensive and confusing for patients, and gives you an idea of what to question and watch out for when dealing with private hospitals.

Thank you for the rec, Harshit!

That’s it from us this week. We’ll see you next Sunday.

Until then, send us your book, music, business movies, documentaries, or podcast recommendations. We’ll feature them in this newsletter! Also, don’t forget to tell us what you thought of today’s edition. Just hit reply to this email (or if you’re reading this on the web, drop us a message at morning@finshots.in).

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