Telegram is banned in India till re-examination of NEET-UG

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

By Tuesday evening, hours after the government order, at least one telecom operator had already blocked access to the service and the app listing had been pulled from Google Play and Apple’s App Store.

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

There are several Telegram groups that spread everything from pirated links to real-time news updates from established organizations; the platform has attracted many users because it offers features such as bot integration into the platform that are usually not found on other popular platforms such as WhatsApp and Signal.

NTA CEO Abhishek Singh said in a video message: “To all parents, please protect your child from financial scams and the panic these rackets are meant to create. NTA is committed to fair, safe and credible investigation and action against all those involved in spreading these scams.”

Telegram founder Pavel Durov criticized the blocking, saying it would “punish” more than 15 million “regular Telegram users in India”. Mr. Durov also said, “The leaks have just moved to other apps.” Although it is not clear what he was referring to, the NTA that day still denied the legitimacy of certain screenshots that were supposed to be what was supposed to be in the question of the upcoming NEET exam.

Mr. Durov added: “Over the past few weeks, we have taken down hundreds of channels in India that were sharing leaked exam materials and related scams. We will also make the ‘edited’ label visible to prevent backdating scams.” Banning the app even temporarily, he said, “is a mistake.”

“We have done a lot to solve the problem – even if the source is not Telegram,” Mr. Durov added in a separate statement on his personal Telegram channel.

The NTA stressed that this blocking was “calibrated and time-limited” and would be lifted at a later date.

The agency said several Telegram groups have been advertising fake exam papers for the upcoming NEET exam and duping candidates willing to pay for them.

“The Indian Cyber Crime Coordination Center (I4C) under the Ministry of Home Affairs has ensured the speedy removal of a significant number of Telegram channels, groups and bots fraudulently advertising and promoting their content and scams,” said the Indian Cyber Crime Coordination Center (I4C), under the Ministry of Home Affairs, based on inputs it continuously receives from NTA, state law enforcement agencies including police forces in of Bihar, Gujarat and Rajasthan, and from its own continuous monitoring of public channels and platforms.

Moreover, many groups, the NTA said, were editing past reports with recent question papers to fake their ability to get written questions in advance.

In separate directions, the IT ministry said it had ordered Telegram to also ban message editing by June 30 to close “this mode of production for the post-examination window in which such artifacts have historically been deployed.”

In two videos released by the NTA on Tuesday night, IIT Madras director V Kamakoti demonstrated retrospective PDF document exchange on the Telegram channel and said fraudsters were using the feature to fraudulently claim to have advance access to question papers for other exams.

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

Meanwhile, late on Tuesday, Mr. Durov accused networks affiliated with Reliance Communications of spreading the ban to other countries by transferring configuration changes made to comply with the block in India to other Internet providers in other countries. He encouraged networks in other countries to ignore these so-called BGP prefix announcements.

Published – 16 Jun 2026 11:37 IST