SLEEPLESS IN INDIA: HERE'S A RUDE AWAKENING

The country's largest-ever study of sleeping patterns, based on a representative sample of nearly half a million Indians, reveals the piling sleep debt of young women tending to household chores, teens and young men hooked to the phone screen before bedtime, and the elderly struggling to fall asleep.

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Work, for many Indian women, typically runs into two shifts: one in a formal setting, and the other at home. But the so-called 'double shift', it turns out, may be eating into their crucial sleep time. They pile up years in lost sleep by the time they complete the childrearing phase.

The average Indian 'working woman' sleeps nearly eight-and-a-half hours a day, which is 10 minutes short of what working men put in, Mint's analysis of official government data shows. Worse, their sleep is more likely to span multiple stretches throughout the day. The crucial single stretch-nighttime sleep-lasts less than eight hours, unlike men, who manage to clock in nearly 20 minutes more.

This comes from what is possibly India's biggest-ever analysis of sleep patterns, by size and scope, covering over 10 million rows and 41 columns of data, which Mint has conducted on the basis of a large government survey held last year, called the Time Use Survey.

The survey's sample of over 450,000 Indians was spread across ages, genders and states, and was representative of the full population.

The trends look different for homemakers.

Burdened by household chores, they, too, sleep less-much less-than men in their households at night, but more than make up for it with daytime napping. This means they end up sleeping beyond nine hours in total, which is quite a luxury for working men. But that's not to say this helps: scientific wisdom says uninterrupted night-time sleep is more valuable for a healthy lifestyle than sleep split over stretches.

How much sleep is sufficient? India does not have an official guideline, nor does the World Health Organization. The UK's National Health Service recommends seven to nine hours for adults; so do some other US official sources.

But for Indian women in prime youth, homemakers or otherwise, fewer than half meet the average figure of eight hours.

Among men, more than 60% make it.