USAID India has committed itself to addressing the needs of the urban poor and working with key partners to mobilize resources and raise awareness about health conditions in urban slums. It also plans to work to improve child health and nutrition among urban slum dwellers in selected cities. The Environmental Health Project (EHP) was tasked with developing an approach and strategy to initiate action toward achieving these goals. To date, EHP has concentrated its efforts on Indore in Madhya Pradesh (MP) state and Jamshedpur in Jharkhand state. It aims to develop, promote and test urban slum approaches to neonatal survival, diarrhea prevention and other child health priorities through behavior change and community actions and to provide technical assistance to slum-based NGOs/CBOs and to Municipal Corporations to improve health-related service delivery and community linkages. The following is a report of a situational analysis of Indore carried out by EHP to guide their program development there. The situational analysis was carried out from July to September 2002. The following approaches, techniques and resources were used for collecting and analyzing information on child health in the slums of Indore: researching secondary sources of data in the public sector and in other parts of the city; group and individual consultations with city stakeholders; telephone and e-mail requests for references and information on current urban health programs and available studies and reports; analysis of available data to compare child health status and determinant indicators for urban, urban poor and rural populations; and focus group discussions (FGDs) held in six slums of Indore to identify maternal and child health beliefs and practices.