The government has temporarily blocked Telegram in India until June 22 and asked the messaging platform to disable its message-editing feature until June 30, ahead of the NEET (UG) 2026 re-examination scheduled for June 21.
In a statement on Monday, the National Testing Agency (NTA) said the move was aimed at stopping fraud and misinformation related to the medical entrance exam.
According to the agency, several Telegram channels and groups were claiming to provide access to the NEET re-exam question paper in exchange for money. The NTA said these claims were fake and urged students not to trust anyone offering exam papers before the test.
The agency said the Indian Cyber Crime Coordination Centre (I4C), along with the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) and state police departments, has been taking down Telegram channels and groups involved in such activities for the past few weeks.
However, NTA said removing individual channels was not enough as new groups kept appearing. This led the agency to seek broader action against the platform during the examination period.
As per the National Testing Agency, the key concern for authorities was Telegram's message-editing feature. NTA said the feature allows users to edit old messages while keeping the original timestamp. Officials claim this has been used to create fake "proof" of paper leaks by adding exam papers to old messages after the exam has already taken place.
The agency also referred to recent enforcement actions by state authorities. In one such case, Ahmedabad Cyber Crime Police arrested members of an alleged cyber fraud gang that operated eight Telegram channels. Investigators found transactions worth around Rs 1.5 crore linked to the operation.
While acknowledging the inconvenience caused to regular users, the NTA said the restriction is temporary and has been imposed to ensure a fair and secure conduct of the NEET re-examination.
The agency added that the NEET (UG) 2026 re-exam will be held as scheduled on June 21 and advised students to rely only on official NTA channels for updates.
The move to block is more a performative move than a strong reassurance that the poor management seen in conducting the exam is a thing of the past. Blocking Telegram is hardly reassurance that the exams will be clean this time, and frankly, the government needs to do a lot more than just these piecemeal moves to show it is serious.
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