The Novel Coronavirus which emerged in India on January/30/2020 has become a catastrophe to the country on the basis of health and economy. Due to rapid variations in the transmission of COVID-19, an accurate prediction to determine the long term effects is infeasible. This paper has introduced a nonlinear mathematical model to interpret the transmission dynamics of COVID-19 infection along with providing vaccination in the precedence. To minimize the level of infection and treatment burden, the optimal control strategies are carried out by using the Pontryagin’s Maximum Principle. The data validation has been done by correlating the estimated number of infectives with the real data of India for the month of March/2021. Corresponding to the model, the basic reproduction number $${\mathcal {R}}_0$$R 0 is introduced to understand the transmission dynamics of COVID-19. To justify the significance of parameters we determined the sensitivity analysis of $${\mathcal {R}}_0$$R 0 using the parameters value. In the numerical simulations, we concluded that reducing $${\mathcal {R}}_0$$R 0 below unity is not sufficient enough to eradicate the COVID-19 disease and thus, it is required to increase the vaccination rate and its efficacy by motivating individuals to take precautionary measures.