Installing reportlab using pip behind a corporate firewall/proxy

While trying to install report lab using pip on a server machine at my office, I was stuck with this error message:

Could not fetch URL https://pypi.python.org/simple/pip/: There was a problem con
firming the ssl certificate: [SSL: CERTIFICATE_VERIFY_FAILED] certificate verify
  failed (_ssl.c:661) – skipping

On digging deeper and researching further, I found the command line solution which worked for me as follows:-

python -m pip install --trusted-host pypi.python.org autopep8 --upgrade --force-reinstall reportlab