The Center has blocked Telegram across India till June 22 and ordered the platform to disable the message editing feature till June 30 — two separate interventions on NTA recommendations, the first to disrupt organized fraud ahead of NEET-UG 2026 re-examination on June 21, and the second to prevent fabrication of retrospective paper leak evidence.
The editing feature restriction addresses a tactic that the NTA, in a statement describing the orders, said was used to manufacture false evidence of advance leaks. The channel admin posts an innocuous message before the exam, then edits it after the exam to insert the actual question paper — Telegram’s editing function does not change the original timestamp of the message, making the manipulated post appear to have preceded the exam. “The resulting chat is then circulated as alleged evidence that the paper was in circulation before the examination,” the NTA said.
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The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) issued both orders under Section 69A of the Information Technology Act. A MeitY official, who requested anonymity, confirmed the existence of the orders and that a copy of them had been shared with the NTA, but said they were not available to the public – directions under Section 69A are treated as confidential under embargo rules.
“Cat and mouse chase”
According to people familiar with the matter, Apple and Google were directed by MeitY to remove Telegram from their app stores in India, while several major ISPs imposed bans that prevented the app from establishing the connection. Telecom operators have also been receiving payments of IP addresses to block from the government. “The problem is that Telegram can also change its IP address. When that happens, the government sends us the latest IP addresses to block. So it’s like a cat-and-mouse chase,” said an executive at a major telecom company.
The NTA described blocking access as a “last resort” and said Telegram channels advertising themselves under names such as “PAPER LEAKED NEET”, “Re-NEET 2026”, “Private Mafia” and “REE NEET MAFIAA” had demanded $14000 to $25,000 – and in some cases $10 lakh – from candidates and their families for the alleged access to the question paper.
The agency said that there is no question paper outside the secured examination series.
The re-examination on June 21 comes in the wake of the cancellation of the original NEET-UG exam held on May 3, which was canceled on May 12 following allegations of paper leakage, including alleged overlaps between the guess sheet distributed earlier and the actual paper. More than 2.27 million candidates have applied for the May 3 exam.
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The Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) is investigating the leak and has arrested 13 people, all of whom are currently in judicial custody.
The access block comes after weeks of coordinated work by the Indian Cybercrime Coordination Center (I4C), working with the NTA and police in Bihar, Gujarat and Rajasthan, which successfully secured the removal of several Telegram channels and bots spreading misinformation and running scams.
“The ban didn’t stop anything”: Telegram CEO responded
“India’s IT ministry banned Telegram for a week because some users shared leaked exam questions. This penalizes over 150 million regular users of Telegram in India – not the insiders who leaked the exam materials. The ban didn’t stop anything. The leaks just trickled down to other apps,” Pavel Durov, founder and CEO of Telegram, said in a post on X.
Durov later added: “We are also making the ‘edited’ tag more visible to prevent back-dating scams.”
HT reported on Monday that the Ahmedabad Cyber Crime Branch arrested Sumer Singh, an ITI graduate from Jaipur, and Akash Meena, a BA graduate from Kota, on charges of running an inter-state Telegram network targeting NEET candidates. The two ran eight channels with an artificially inflated membership, charged up to $49,999 for the alleged question papers, which were allegedly almost laundered $1.5 Crores through multiple accounts.
Abhishek Singh, director general of the NTA, said the agency sought the block because Telegram is “continuously misused by fraudsters and scammers” as they distribute fake papers as real and exploit anxiety of candidates. He added that although about 200 channels were removed, scammers continued to appear.
Dhruv Garg, partner at consultancy India Governance and Policy Project, raised concerns about proportionality.
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“Restricting access to Telegram affects many everyday users – students, training groups, teachers, professionals, journalists and small businesses – who have nothing to do with the misconduct. The more difficult question is whether a platform-wide restriction is the least intrusive way to address a particular pattern of misuse.”
He added that if Telegram is singled out, “the justification would have to be Telegram-specific,” and based on particular channels, platform design features, or a pattern of non-compliance that makes narrow measures insufficient.
Telegram certainly remains accessible via VPNs. Even if channels continue to operate from outside India, removing the local audience would protect students from losing money due to fraud, NTA DG Singh said.
This is not the first time Telegram has been in the spotlight for content on its service. In March, the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting directed Telegram under Section 79(3)(b) of the Information Technology Act to remove over 3,000 channels distributing pirated content within three hours. Tuesday’s orders, issued under Section 69A, cover the entire platform.
MeitY and I4C did not respond to HT’s queries.
