For the last three decades, Lal carted passengers along bumpy thoroughfares to temples, markets and offices in New Delhi, working every day through the winter months when a pall of toxic smog settles over the sprawling megacity.
Delhi is consistently ranked the world's worst capital for air quality and on its most polluted days the smog can cut visibility on the roads to barely 50 metres. Factory emissions, vehicle exhausts and crop-clearing fires from farms in neighbouring states combine to cast the city of 20 million people in an otherworldly coat of yellow-grey haze near the end of each year.Piecemeal efforts to mitigate the smog, such as a public campaign encouraging drivers to turn off their engines at traffic lights, have failed to make an impact.
But they stopped short of accepting a call by India's Supreme Court to declare the city's first "pollution lockdown", which would have restricted the population to their homes.
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