The Delhi High Court on Friday upheld the temporary restrictions imposed on Telegram ahead of the NEET-UG re-examination. The court stated that given the nature of the emergency, the Center had provided sufficient reasons to temporarily block access to the platform.
A single bench of Justice Tejas Karia noted that the government’s order was based on the relevant materials and did not suffer from any non-application of mind, as alleged by Telegram in its petition challenging the order.
The platform approached the Supreme Court on Wednesday, challenging the interim restrictions imposed by the Center ahead of re-examination on June 21. In support of the restrictions, the court stated that content and information generated by Telegram fell within the scope of Section 69A of the Information Technology Act.
Justice Kataria noted that the government order was “less restrictive” and “disproportionate”, and that the proportionality test was also met.
The Center imposed the ban order till June 22 after the National Testing Agency (NTA) uncovered a large-scale fraud network operating on the platform.
Apart from the ban order, the NTA said the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) has also directed the platform to disable the message editing feature in India until June 30.
