The present study aimed to investigate the impact of COVID-19 across different work forces in the Dehradun city of Uttarakhand India. During 2020-2021, field survey was carried out for data collection, semi-structured interviews with open ended questions using purposive sampling was employed. The majority of the local inhabitants in the Dehradun city are daily wage labourers, shopkeepers, street vendors, transporters, fisher men and many are associated with tourism. A comparative analysis revealed that people associated with tourism were mostly affected, followed by those associated with fish. Due to the pandemic the impact observed was primarily due to fear of transmission of disease, and unknown time for lockdown. Pre COVID-19 trends reveal that the rate of female unemployment was higher than male across the India, since the onset of the COVID-19, this gap seems to have widened, our results also reveal that female folk were totally out of the labour market creating a potential path for unemployment, which in turn affects the per house income. Our study also exposed the declining sense of community as many people, violating the “stay home” which was due to self-centric behavior. Further, urbanization trends continue to increase, there is a vital need to address city-level governance (i.e., long-term visioning, pre-event planning, investment in healthcare, education, coordination activities) so that an effective response mechanism to pandemics and disease outbreaks in cities can be operated in the time. The present article tried to make a distinctive contribution to the academic literature through inherently interdisciplinary nature.