NEET-UG re-exam: Telegram app restricted in India at NTA request

At the National Testing Agency (NTA)’s request, the Union government is blocking the messaging app Telegram in India for a week until Monday (June 22, 2026), following what the NTA described as a “response to the organised use of the platform by cheating rackets to defraud candidates appearing for the NEET (UG) 2026 re-examination scheduled on 21 June 2026.”

On Tuesday evening, a few hours after the government’s order, at least one telecom operator had already blocked access to the service, and the app’s listing was taken down from Google Play and Apple’s App Store.

This is the first time that a messaging app operating at such a scale is being blocked in India by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology, even for a limited period.

There are several Telegram groups circulating everything from pirated links to real-time news updates from established organisations; the platform has attracted many users as it offers features such as integrating bots into the platform, not typically found on other popular platforms such as WhatsApp and Signal.

In a video message, NTA Director General Abhishek Singh said, “To all parents, I say, please protect your child from financial fraud and from the panic these rackets are designed to create. NTA is committed to a fair, secure and credible examination, and to act against every person involved in spreading these scams.”

Telegram founder Pavel Durov criticised the blocking, saying it “punishes” over 15 crore “ordinary Telegram users in India”. Mr. Durov also said, “The leaks just moved to other apps.” While it is unclear what he was referring to, the NTA on the day kept dismissing the legitimacy of certain screenshots purported to be that of the upcoming NEET exam’s question paper.

Mr. Durov added, “Over the past few weeks, we removed hundreds of channels sharing leaked exam materials and related scams in India. We’re also making the “edited” label more visible to prevent backdating scams.” Banning the app even temporarily, he said, “is a mistake”.

“We’ve done a lot to fix the problem — even though the source is not Telegram,” Mr. Durov added in a separate statement on his personal Telegram channel.

The NTA emphasised that this blocking was “calibrated and bounded in time,” and that it would be lifted later.

The agency said that several Telegram groups were advertising fake exam papers for the upcoming NEET exam and defrauding candidates willing to pay for them.

“Acting on inputs received continuously from 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), under the Ministry of Home Affairs, 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,” NTA said.

Additionally, many groups, the NTA said, were editing past messages with recent exam paper questions, to fake their capabilities in obtaining question papers in advance.

In separate directions, the IT Ministry said that it had ordered Telegram to disable message editing as well until June 30, to shut off “this avenue of fabrication for the post-examination window in which such artefacts have historically been deployed.”

IIT Madras director V. Kamakoti, in two videos published on Tuesday evening by the NTA, demonstrated a retrospective PDF document swap on a Telegram channel, and said that scammers use this feature to fraudulently claim that they had advance access to question papers for other exams. 

“NTA acknowledges that the access restriction issued by MeitY affects lakhs of citizens who use the Telegram platform for legitimate personal, educational, professional and informational purposes, and sincerely regrets the inconvenience caused to them,” the agency said in its statement.

Meanwhile, late Tuesday evening, Mr. Durov accused Reliance Communications-associated networks of spreading the ban to other countries by transmitting configuration changes made as part of complying with the blocking in India to other internet providers in other countries. He urged networks in other countries to ignore these so-called BGP prefix announcements.