Why was Telegram Banned in India? NEET Re-Exam Scam Explained
Why Was Telegram Banned: India blocked Telegram nationwide till June 22 over a NEET re-exam scam exploiting message-editing. How it worked, who was arrested, and Punjab’s free bus move.
North Desk Correspondent
Chandigarh, June 17
India’s Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) blocked Telegram across the country on Tuesday, locking out all 150 million of the platform’s Indian users days before the NEET-UG 2026 re-examination on June 21. The order, issued under Section 69A of the Information Technology Act, runs until June 22 — covering exam day and its immediate aftermath — while a separate direction forces Telegram to disable message-editing for all Indian users through June 30.
The trigger wasn’t a new paper leak. The National Testing Agency (NTA), which recommended the block, has stated flatly that no genuine re-exam paper exists outside the secured examination chain. What forced the government’s hand instead was a specific, oddly technical loophole in how Telegram channels work — one that fraud networks had been exploiting for weeks to manufacture fake “leak” evidence and sell it to anxious families.
Why was Telegram banned, specifically
Why Was Telegram Banned? On Telegram, channel administrators — unlike ordinary users, who can only edit their own messages within 48 hours — face no time limit on editing posts they’ve published to a channel, including swapping out attached files such as PDFs. Crucially, when a message is edited, it keeps its original timestamp. Subscribers scrolling through the channel see only the current version, with a small “edited” tag that’s easy to miss or crop out of a screenshot.
That gap became the fraud’s engine. According to the NTA, channels operating under names such as “PAPER LEAKED NEET” and “Private Mafia” posted blank or unrelated placeholder messages before the exam window, then edited them afterward — sometimes in the exam’s final hours — to insert exam-related content.
The edited post, still carrying its original pre-exam timestamp, was then screenshotted and circulated as supposed proof that the paper had leaked in advance. There was no leak. The “evidence” was manufactured after the fact.
This is the second time NEET-UG 2026 has run into trouble. The original exam, held May 3 for more than 2.27 million candidates across over 5,400 centres, was cancelled on May 12 after investigators found a “guess paper” circulating before the test had substantial overlap with the actual questions — a complaint first raised by a Rajasthan hostel owner the day before the exam.
The CBI took over that probe, leading to arrests of school officials and coaching operators. This time, with the re-exam approaching, the fraud shifted from leaking real material to fabricating fake evidence of a leak that never happened.
The Money Trail
Why Was Telegram Banned: The scale was real even if the leak wasn’t. By the NTA’s own count, roughly 1,500 students or their families paid out close to ₹1.5 crore — about $180,000 — to channels promising access to the re-exam paper, with demands ranging from ₹14,000 to ₹25,000 and, in some cases, up to ₹10 lakh. A technology policy research group, the Esya Centre, traced the channels to coordinated networks run by the same operators across multiple channels, pricing access in tiers from ₹5,000 to ₹10 lakh.
Two arrests stand out. The Ahmedabad City Cyber Crime Branch picked up Sumer Singh Meena of Jaipur and Akash Meena of Kota, accusing them of running eight Telegram channels as part of an inter-state racket that also ran separate investment-fraud schemes. In Bihar, police arrested Navin Yadav for allegedly exploiting weak passwords on the NTA’s candidate portal to break into roughly 150 students’ accounts and redirect their exam-fee refunds — money the NTA had offered to return after the May cancellation.
NTA Director General Abhishek Singh said the agency, working with the Indian Cyber Crime Coordination Centre and police in Bihar, Gujarat and Rajasthan, had been taking down individual fraudulent channels for weeks before concluding that channel-by-channel removal couldn’t keep pace — what the agency called a “last resort” justification for the platform-wide block.
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What This Means for Punjab and Chandigarh
Why Was Telegram Banned: For candidates in the region, the more immediate development may be procedural rather than digital: the Punjab Cabinet has approved free bus travel for NEET-UG candidates and one accompanying attendant to examination centres across Punjab and Chandigarh for the June 21 retest.
Security around the re-exam has also been tightened nationally, with the NTA enlisting Indian Air Force helicopters to move question papers within a compressed timeframe and rolling out enhanced identity-verification measures at some centres — steps that have drawn some criticism, including from former Tamil Nadu BJP chief K. Annamalai, who argued the heightened security adds to candidates’ exam-day pressure rather than easing it.
The Legal Pushback
Why Was Telegram Banned: Not everyone agrees the ban is even lawful. The Internet Freedom Foundation, India’s leading digital rights group, argues that Section 69A authorizes the government to block specific pieces of “information” on a computer resource — not an entire platform, and not a forced redesign of a product feature for every user in the country.
The IFF has invoked the 2015 Supreme Court ruling in Shreya Singhal v. Union of India, which upheld Section 69A precisely because the court found it narrow and bound by procedural safeguards; the foundation argues both the platform-wide block and the message-editing order exceed that scope. It has also pointed out that India’s 2009 Blocking Rules require government blocking orders to stay confidential — meaning anyone wanting to challenge the ban in court can’t actually see the government’s stated justification for it.
Telegram founder Pavel Durov called the move a “rash decision” that punishes ordinary users for the actions of a few insiders, and said the company had already pulled hundreds of fraud channels and made its “edited” label harder to miss. His sharper point: the fraud didn’t stop, it just moved. Within hours of the block, he said, the same scams were running on WhatsApp instead.
What Candidates Should Know Before June 21
The NTA’s message to the roughly 2.27 million students sitting the retest is unambiguous: there is no leaked paper, on Telegram, WhatsApp, or anywhere else, and anyone offering one — at any price — is running a scam. Students who encounter such offers are advised to report them through the NTA’s official portal rather than engage or pay. The Telegram block lifts June 22; the restriction on message-editing continues through June 30.
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