Hailing a taxi in Kolkata means a hulking yellow one. Not for much longer
Published: 5:15pm, 19 Feb 2025
Kolkata residents cherish their city's past, which is why many in the one-time Indian capital are mourning a vanishing emblem of its faded grandeur: a hulking and noisy fleet of stately yellow taxis.
The snub-nosed Hindustan Ambassador, the first of which rolled off the assembly line in the 1950s and whose design has barely changed in the decades since, once ruled India's potholed streets. Nowadays, it is rarely spotted outside Kolkata , where it serves as the backbone of the metropolitan cab fleet and a readily recognisable symbol of the eastern city's identity.
But its numbers are dwindling fast, and a court ruling means those that remain – lumbering but still sturdy – will be forced off the roads entirely in the next three years. A row of Hindustan Ambassador yellow taxis parked along a roadside in Kolkata. Photo: AFP A Hindustan Ambassador yellow taxi passes a heritage building in Kolkata. Photo: AFP
'I love my car like my son,' Kailash Sahani, who has sat behind the wheel of an Ambassador cab for the past four decades, says.
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