A polling booth in Alipurduar with an all-woman team on duty on Saturday panchayat elections had a unique poser — a large ballot paper.

As the four-member team headed by Rakhi Sarkar, the presiding officer of booth 12/64/13 in Falakata block of the district, reached the distribution and collection centre in Bhutanirghat High School of the block to collect voting materials, they were in for a surprise.

“One packet was quite large. As we opened it, we found it had huge ballot papers for one panchayat samiti level seat with 25 candidates,” said Rakhi.

The ballot papers of 47cm length and 35cm width, sources said, were probably the biggest printed for this year’s rural polls.

The Telegraph had earlier reported about the booth. Among the 25 candidates, 22 are Independents — schoolteachers in the fray to avoid polling duty.

On Saturday, as voting started across the state, reports of violence came from different districts.

It was peaceful at Rakhi’s booth at a library in Jateswar of Falakata block, but her problem was new.

“There was no violence in our booth. However, the election process was slow as it took us time to fold this ballot paper. All members of our team were on election duty for the first time.... We never thought a ballot paper would pose a challenge to finish polling in time,” she said.

In the afternoon, officials at the BDO office in Falakata came to know about this “inconvenience”.

“It was taking time to fold these big papers and put them in the ballot box. That is why polling was slow. As the matter came to our notice, another polling person was engaged at the booth to fold the papers,” said an official.

Supratik Majumder, the BDO of Falakata, said they had to get the ballot paper printed from outside the district as no printing press in Alipurduar could print it.

“We are also lucky there were 22 Independents. The cap for the number of symbols for Independents is 22. Had there been one more Independent, it would have been a problem,” he said.