India has temporarily blocked access to Telegram until 22 June, the government said, after concluding that cheating rackets were using the app to defraud candidates sitting a high-stakes medical-entrance re-exam. The order, invoking Section 69A of the Information Technology Act, ties a national app block to a single, fraught testing event.
The exam is NEET-UG, the entrance test for India’s undergraduate medical and dental courses, scheduled for a re-examination on 21 June.
According to the government, Telegram channels, groups, and bots had been advertising fraudulent access to the re-exam paper under names such as “PAPER LEAKED NEET” and “Re-NEET 2026,” demanding sums from a few thousand to several lakh rupees from anxious candidates. Several were taken down before the broader block.
The detail that drew particular concern was a Telegram feature rather than a channel. The platform’s message-editing tool lets an administrator alter an old message while keeping its original timestamp, which authorities said could be used after an exam to insert the real paper into a backdated message and pass it off as proof the paper had leaked beforehand. To address that, a second order requires Telegram to disable message editing in India until 30 June.
