The cities that write India’s software are struggling to close their own eyes. That is the pattern running through the Traya Hair Test Report, an analysis of 4,89,721 men’s hair test responses across 20 states and 50 cities, when it is read along the country’s technology corridor.
Chennai reports the worst sleep of any city in India, with 30.9% of its men describing their sleep as disturbed. Hyderabad follows among the major tech hubs at 27.6%, with Bengaluru at 24.5% and Pune at 22.7%, every one of them at or above the national average of 22.1%. Add the men reporting slight problems during sleep and the share of imperfect sleepers in Hyderabad and Bengaluru rises past one in three; in Chennai it exceeds four in ten.
Stress runs on the same rails
The stress numbers track the same geography. 63.9% of Hyderabad’s men report high or moderate stress, as do roughly 61.5% in Bengaluru and 65.4% in Chennai, the highest of any metro. The national average is 54.6%. Pune, the corridor’s junior partner, sits at 56.4%, still above the country line. Vijayawada and Coimbatore, both cities with fast growing technology and industrial economies, record the two highest rates of high stress in all of India at 10.6% and 10.4%.
Traya data, measured where the industry lives
The dataset is deepest exactly where the technology economy is densest, which lends the pattern unusual solidity. Hyderabad contributes 36,874 respondents, the largest city sample in the report, with Pune at 27,694, Bengaluru at 23,580 and Chennai at 12,800 among the biggest samples nationally. The corridor is not being extrapolated; it is being counted.
The comparison group makes the contrast vivid. The cities reporting India’s soundest sleep, Jodhpur, Patna, Jaipur and Varanasi, all at under 18% disturbed sleep, share one obvious feature: none of them is a technology hub.
The debate this data belongs to
India has spent the past two years arguing about work hours, hustle culture and what the technology industry’s pace does to the people inside it. That debate has run heavy on anecdote and light on measurement. This dataset supplies the missing layer. It does not identify causes, and night shifts aligned to foreign time zones, long commutes, screen saturation and the simple adrenaline of a boom are all plausible contributors that the data cannot separate. But it establishes the outcome with unusual clarity: the geography of India’s disturbed sleep is, to a remarkable degree, the geography of its technology industry.
The industry measures everything: velocity, uptime, utilisation. On this evidence, the one metric it has not been watching is the rest of the men who keep it running.
The full report, including complete state and city tables, is available on the Traya newsroom at traya.health/newsroom, along with the latest Traya news and updates.
Methodology: Findings are drawn from 4,89,721 hair test responses submitted by men across India, spanning 20 states and 50 cities. Sleep quality and stress levels are self reported by respondents as part of the Traya hair test questionnaire. Figures are population level statistics and do not represent medical diagnoses. Data extracted March and April 2026.
Note: no part of this article makes a medical, diagnostic, or treatment claim. All figures are population level statistics from self reported responses on the Traya hair test.
