An unprecedented upsurge of COVID-19-positive cases and deaths is currently being witnessed across India. According to WHO, India reported an average of 3.9 lakhs of new cases during the first week of May 2021 which equals 47% of new cases reported globally and 276 daily cases per million population. In this letter, the concept of SIR and fractal interpolation models is applied to predict the number of positive cases in India by approximating the epidemic curve, where the epidemic curve denotes the two-dimensional graphical representation of COVID-19-positive cases in which the abscissa denotes the time, while the ordinate provides the number of positive cases. In order to estimate the epidemic curve, the fractal interpolation method is implemented on the prescribed data set. In particular, the vertical scaling factors of the fractal function are selected from the SIR model. The proposed fractal and SIR model can also be explored for the assessment and modeling of other epidemics to predict the transmission rate. This letter investigates the duration of the second and third waves in India, since the positive cases and death cases of COVID-19 in India have been highly increasing for the past few weeks, and India is in a midst of a catastrophizing second wave. The nation is recording more than 120 million cases of COVID-19, but pandemics are still concentrated in most states. In order to predict the forthcoming trend of the outbreaks, this study implements the SIR and fractal models on daily positive cases of COVID-19 in India and its provinces, namely Delhi, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, Kerala and Maharashtra. © 2021, The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Società Italiana di Fisica and Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature.