There are limited studies on COVID vaccine confidence at the household level in urban slums, which are at high risk of COVID-19 transmission due to overcrowding and poor living conditions. The objective was to understand the reasons influencing COVID-19 vaccine confidence, in terms of barriers and enablers faced by communities in urban slums and informal settlements in four major metro cities in India. A mixed method approach was adopted, where in field studies were conducted during April–May 2021. First, a survey of at least 50 subjects was conducted among residents of informal urban settlements who had not taken any dose of the COVID-19 vaccine in Mumbai, Bengaluru, Kolkata and Delhi; second, a short interview with five subjects who had taken at least one dose of the vaccine in each of the four cities to understand the factors that contributed to positive behaviour and, finally, an in-depth interview of at least 3 key informants in each city to ascertain the vaccination pattern in the communities. The reasons were grouped under contextual, individual/group and vaccine/vaccination specific issues. The most frequent reason (27.7%) was the uncertainty of getting the vaccine. The findings show the need for increasing effectiveness of awareness campaigns, accessibility and the convenience of vaccination, especially among vulnerable groups, to increase the uptake.

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The COVID pandemic has exposed several faultlines of urbanism in India. This paper is a narrative of the remarkable continuities between the past legacies of governance of informal settlements, pandemic response and emerging ideas of alternate urbanisms and their inability to address issues of inequity, exclusion and vulnerability. The pandemic and the resultant situation exposes the limits of the current policies, programming linked to informal settlements, their imagination of informality and outlines the urgent need to escape the trap of bracketing of informal settlements as an ‘issue’ within itself delinked from the dynamic and ever-changing processes of urbanization through community led policy responses and effective local governance. In the absence of effective state response, informal settlements authored their own script of coping with the challenges thrown by the pandemic; their presence, participation and centrality in scripting future policies is a much-needed transformation of the narrative.

The issue of managing solid waste (SW), especially in the major cities, is of growing concern to the municipal organisations in India. The present performance of the system is recognised to be unsatisfactory. This paper delineates an approach to quantify the satisfaction level of the residents as a measure of performance of the system and also presents a case study in a major city. The results show the validity of the approach.