Few sights and sounds are as familiar in Delhi as colourful auto rickshaws and the rhythmic beat of their engines.
The same could be said of the Indian capital's notorious air pollution, fed in part by the three-wheelers' belching exhausts.
Indrajeet Sachdeva has been driving one for decades, earning a few hundred rupees a day.
Now, he says his career is at risk after Delhi's government announced a ban on new non-electric rickshaws from January 2027.
From April 2028, the ban will extend to new motorcycles and scooters as well, slowly replacing more than 6 million small vehicles registered in the city in a bid to clean its persistent smog.
Since the 50s, rickshaws with two-stroke engines have become notorious for their iconic tuktuk sound and smoky exhausts, contributing to harmful smog in Delhi and other large Asian cities.
India's Supreme Court mandated Delhi's rickshaws switch to compressed natural gas (CNG) in 2001 to help clean the city's air, but the problem hasn't gone away.
In 2025, air quality tracking service IQAir ranked Delhi's urban area as the most polluted on Earth.
"Estimates vary between one-third to 50 per cent [of Delhi's pollution] coming from transport," International Council on Clean Transportation (ICCT) India director Amit Bhatt said.
"We've found that CNG vehicles are not so clean when it comes to nitrogen oxide emissions, and nitrogen oxides lead to secondary particulate matter [in the air]."
Despite the persistent pollution, many rickshaw drivers still consider CNG a clean alternative to petrol and fear losing their income to another change.
"I have been driving an auto since 2002 and [an electric rickshaw] costs 250,000 to 300,000 rupees ($3,700-$4,400)," rickshaw driver Suraj Kumar Gupta said.
Mr Sachdeva, who leads a welfare group for rickshaw drivers in the city, said they were planning a legal challenge before the restrictions in January.
Regardless of the challenge, they may soon be outnumbered by others who have already switched.
ICCT researcher Sunitha Anup said their analysis indicated around half of India's rickshaws were already electric, a far higher percentage than any other class of vehicle.
"For four-wheelers, it's around 4 per cent," she said.
Other South and South-East Asian countries have also embraced electric scooters, motorcycles and rickshaws far more than electric cars.
India's micro-EV boom has been partly supported by imported components that can be easily adapted for use by local manufacturers.
However, just days after Delhi's cabinet signed its new EV policy into law, the drivers of those affordable electric rickshaws were given a rude shock.
In July, videos began to spread online showing electric rickshaws stopping dead on Delhi's streets.
The hack was simple and spread quickly: scammers would download a free battery management app, scan for passing vehicles with unsecured Bluetooth connections, then use the app to disable the battery remotely.
Some would use this opportunity to extort money from the driver.
The Indian government responded quickly, ordering Google and Apple to remove some Chinese battery management apps from app stores.
Experts have warned that many of Delhi's electric rickshaws are still vulnerable.
"These [banned] apps are not the only apps; anybody can write such an app and share it," International Institute of Information Technology Hyderabad director Sandeep Kumar Shukla said.
"We have these battery packs being imported and being fitted into vehicles without any cybersecurity compliance check."
As organised and vocal as Delhi's rickshaw drivers may be, they are far outnumbered by the city's motorcycles and scooters.
With the ban on new non-electric two-wheeled vehicles starting in April 2028, the countdown is on to prepare the electrical grid for a surge in charging.
ICCT's Mr Bhatt said the smaller size of two- and three-wheeled EVs would make the transition easier for Delhi's infrastructure but admitted that access to chargers would be an obstacle for many.
"Two-wheelers and three-wheelers do not require the massive public charging which a truck or a bus or even a car would require; a lot of charging will happen at home," Mr Bhatt said.
However, he conceded that after owning an EV himself for four years in Delhi, he still hadn't been permitted to install a charger at his home.
"My resident welfare association is saying, 'What if it catches fire because there is no [regulation or guidelines] on how to go about setting up this charging?'" he said.
Driver Indrajeet Sachdeva estimated 90 per cent of rickshaw owners did not have a space at home to install chargers.
At one of Delhi's public charging stations for swappable batteries, the ABC watched drivers waiting while the machine's display listed four batteries were ready.
When a battery was requested from the machine, a pop-up message said none were available.
Mr Sachdeva said issues like this meant the government needed to give the industry more time before going all-in on electrification.
