Predictors of COVID-19 Vaccine Confidence: Findings from Slums of Four Major Metro Cities of India.

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.

Informal settlements, the emerging response to COVID and the imperative of transforming the narrative.

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.