The twenty-first century, often referred to as the urban century, witnesses a significant portion of the world’s population embracing city life as their preferred residence. With the ongoing global population growth, urbanization is expected to intensify in the coming three decades, shaping cities into even more densely populated and interconnected hubs. Large population size in the cities along with the economic activities, rampant lifestyle, technological interventions, energy use, land use pattern, and climate policies, are some of the important parameters in urban areas that impact sustainability. When natural resources are used to meet both the immediate demands of the current population and those of future generations without significantly compromising the urban ecosystem and environment, sustainable development can be achieved. However, high population density and increased resource utilization have given rise to numerous challenges linked to climate change and environmental degradation, such as increased air pollution, greenhouse gas emissions, waste generation, and ecosystem sustainability. In cities, urban climate is mainly driven by topography, air pollution, urban surface materials, anthropogenic heat, greenhouse gases, and carbon emissions. For example, in India, large cities like New Delhi, Kolkata, Mumbai, Hyderabad, Chennai, and Bangalore exhibit the highest carbon footprints of 69.6, 42.9, 32.1, 26.5, 21.8, and 21.6 Mt. CO2, respectively. However, in contrary to the general observed trend, these cities exhibited local climate variations during the COVID-19 lockdown. Motivated by this unique observation, we attempt to study the major temperature variations that happened in the above cities between the pandemic years (2019 to 2021). The important factors, such as aspects of pollutant concentration that accounted for such a change in local temperature, were investigated for 4 years, i.e., 2019, 2020, 2021, and 2022. The analysis revealed that all the cities except New Delhi and Kolkata showed lower temperatures than normal during the pandemic in the summer season, especially when the urban heat effect was evident. In New Delhi, among all the pollutants, the aerosol index had a positive correlation (0.29) with the land surface temperature, while in Bangalore, the presence of carbon monoxide (CO) and nitrogen dioxide (NO2) showed the highest correlation of 0.57 and 0.69, respectively, with the land surface temperature.