‘I barely sleep for four hours’: Are pesticides robbing farmers worldwide of sleep?

Even after 12 exhausting hours in the fields, farmworker Sudhakar Tasgave still struggles to get any rest. ‘I barely sleep for four hours,’ he says. Every morning, he feels drained and continues his demanding routine of spraying pesticides, followed by backbreaking tasks that include tilling, harvesting crops and hauling them in in the scorching heat of western India.

Initially, he ignored his insomnia, thinking it was temporary and would resolve itself within a few days. But when it became a pattern, he started to worry. ‘I kept wondering what was going wrong,’ he says. After monitoring his day for over a year, he realised that his sleep problems worsened after pesticide spraying.