Traffic came to a standstill and the police were forced to switch to managing traffic manually as hordes of VIPs made their way to north Delhi's Rajghat for the funeral of former prime minister IK Gujral on Saturday afternoon. Gridlocks were reported from all over Delhi — especially central and south — with commuters complaining of having been stuck for several hours as VIPs passed by on parallel carriageways.

“It took me more than an hour to cover the three-kilometre distance between the ITO Bridge and my office at Connaught Place,” complained Rajesh Sahu, 35, a bank executive.

"When I finally made it till the Tilak Bridge, which took me 25 minutes, I had to wait at the crossing for 20 more minutes before I was finally allowed to take a right turn towards Mandi House."

Congestion at several arterial crossings — including BRT in south Delhi — had a spill-over effect with traffic jams persisting till early evening. Traffic police said they had to switch over to manually managing vehicular movement.

"The BRT was completely choc-a-bloc and traffic was being completely mismanaged there," said Dharini Narayan, a resident of south Delhi's Greater Kailash.

"Because of prolonged stoppage on the entire stretch, the Nizamuddin flyover too got jammed. There was no deployment by the traffic police at the subsequent roundabout and, with no signals working, two-wheelers were zipping around on all sides," she complained.

A senior traffic police officer said the extra deployment was in place keeping the movement of VIP vehicles in mind and no major snarls were reported.