The Ministry of Electronics and IT has blocked popular messaging platform Telegram in India until June 22 at the request of the National Testing Agency (NTA), responsible for conducting the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (NEET), after the country’s key undergraduate medical entrance exam was cancelled earlier this year due to widespread paper leak allegations and irregularities.
The ban on Telegram applies till after a day of NEET’s re-examination, which is scheduled for June 21, following the cancellation of the initial May 3 exam due to a paper leak. The platform is believed to have been used to circulate leaked questions and communicate with students, middlemen and others linked to the network.
The blocking order has been issued under Section 69(A) of the Information Technology Act, 2000. The government has also issued a direction to Telegram to disable, in India, its message-editing feature in respect of messages already posted until June 30. This, the NTA said, would address “the specific structural feature through which the platform has been used to fabricate after-the-event ‘paper leak’ evidence in respect of national examinations”.
“The directions are a measure of last resort,” the NTA said.
In a statement, the NTA said that over the last few weeks, Telegram channels operating openly on the platform demanded sums ranging from a few thousand to several lakhs of rupees from candidates and their families, in exchange for purported access to the re-examination paper. As per the NTA, some of these channels were openly advertising their purpose through their names: “PAPER LEAKED NEET”, “Re-NEET 2026”, “Private Mafia”, and “REE NEET MAFIAA”. It clarified that no such papers were available “outside the secured examination chain”.
On June 15, The Indian Express reported that the cybercrime branch of the Ahmedabad city police Monday arrested two men from Rajasthan for allegedly running a racket that defrauded medical aspirants and their parents via Telegram by allegedly claiming to have the NEET (UG) re-examination question paper and offering to sell it to them. The police said that the duo did not possess any leaked documents.
Acting on inputs received from the NTA, from State law-enforcement agencies including the police forces of Bihar, Gujarat and Rajasthan, and from its own continuous monitoring of public channels and platforms, the Indian Cyber Crime Coordination Centre (I4C) has secured the prompt take-down of a “substantial” number of Telegram channels, groups and bots whose names and content openly advertised their fraudulent and misleading purpose, the testing agency said.
