Come March 2025 and a big change will come over Kolkata’s streets. Over 64 per cent of the iconic yellow taxis, or around 2,500 of them, will be off the roads because of the 15-year limit of service imposed by the Bengal Transport Department, the reason being pollution. Over 5,000 yellow Ambassadors have already gone off the road, as of August 2024, according to a Transport Department official speaking to The Indian Express, and 2,500 more will soon follow suit.

A July 2009 order by the green bench of the Supreme Court ruled that all commercial vehicles over 15 years old must be scrapped.

The Supreme Court ruling, combined with the fact of Hindustan Motors (HM) announcing in 2015 that it had stopped production of Ambassador cars because of their unviability in the light of competition from modern swifter, less polluting and much better-designed cars, means that the yellow taxis will soon completely disappear.

Besides increasing completion, another major factor was behind HM’s decision: The Trinamool Congress government announced in 2013 that the model of commercial taxi cabs would be the Maruti SwiftDzire. The government also changed the colour of the taxi from yellow to blue and white.

The official mentioned earlier said that by 2027 it is expected that Ambassador taxis would all but vanish from the city streets.

In 1962, the Calcutta Taxi Association introduced Ambassadors as the standard taxi models in two colours—yellow-and-black for city commute and yellow for intercity travel. In 1994, the then Left Front government announced the ‘All Bengal Permit’ for all taxis in the state. The government also gave Kolkata’s taxis their universal and the -conic yellow colour.

Since it was introduced in the 1960s, the yellow Ambassador taxi has come to be synonymous with Kolkata, formerly Calcutta. It was featured in celebrated films spanning decades—from Satyajit Ray’s Calcutta Trilogy in the 1970s, to Aparna Sen’s 1981 film, 36 Chowringhee Lane and more recently, the 2012 Vidya Balan-starrer Kahaani.