Project description 

The Ministry of Health and Family Welfare’s (MoHFW), Containment Plan for Large Outbreaks: Novel Coronoavirus Disease (Covid-19) was being implemented proactively across many States during the 1st Wave in 2020. The geographic quarantine strategy proposed by the Containment Plan, however, called for near absolute interruption of movement of people to and from a defined geographic area where there is a single large outbreak or multiple foci of local transmission. However, the proposed geographic quarantine applied to relatively large areas spread over multiple blocks of one or more contiguous districts. This macro-level approach made the direct adoption of the Containment Plan by Municipalities / Municipal Corporations difficult in their towns and cities, leading to i) a slower and, in some ways, ad-hoc response from them, making containment strategies less effective; ii) multiple models / variations of the Containment Plan being implemented across states, thereby making reporting structures and data gathering inconsistent.

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HTAU’s proposed Implementation Framework for Management, Monitoring and Containment of Covid-19 in Indian Towns and Cities extended and contextualized the recommendations of MoHFW’s Containment Plan to the scale of an urban agglomeration. It was founded on classifying city areas into two broad categories of use-types – Residential Areas (RA) and Non-Residential Areas (NRA) - and Transport Systems that act as a facilitator between these two.

Seven different RA Types usually found in Indian cities based on parameters such as population densities, dwelling and household size, existence of mixed-use (industrial / commercial / retail within residential neighborhoods) street widths (for service access), levels of amenity etc. became the building blocks of the Framework. Monitoring and Containment Protocols were detailed for each of the seven identified RA Types, addressing the needs and constraints specific to that RA’s socio-economic context and built environment. Amongst others, Protocols included the establishment of a Health Booth within an RA and colour coding RAs based on the intensity of spread.

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Key outcomes

The Framework was accepted by the Asian Development Bank, India Resident Mission, and shared with its Health Infrastructure teams for dissemination across States.