COVID-19 and urban vulnerability in India

The global pandemic has an inherently urban character. The UN-Habitat's publication of a Response Plan for mollification of the SARS-CoV-2 based externalities in the cities of the world testifies to that. This article takes the UN-Habitat report as the premise to carry out an empirical investigation in the four major metro cities of India. The report's concern with the urban character of the pandemic has underlined the role of cities in disease transmission. In that wake, the study demarcates factors at the sub-city level that tend to jeopardize the two mandatory precautionary measures during COVID-19 - Social Distancing and Lockdown. It investigates those factors through a Covid Vulnerability Index. The Index devised with the help of Analytic Hierarchy Process demarcates the low, moderate, high, and very high vulnerable city sub-units. Secondly, UN-Habitat's one of the major action areas is evidence-based knowledge creation through mapping and its analysis. In our study, we do it at a granular scale for arriving at a more nuanced understanding. Thus, in harmony with the UN-habitat's we take the urban seriously and identify the gaps that need to be plugged for the pandemic cities of now and of the future.