Hyderabad: Messaging platform Telegram on Wednesday, June 17, approached the Delhi High Court challenging the central government’s decision to temporarily block access to its app in India, saying the move punished over 150 million ordinary users rather than those responsible for leaking examination papers.
The matter was mentioned before a vacation bench of Justice Tejas Karia, who allowed urgent listing of the petition for hearing on Wednesday.
The government, on recommendations from the National Testing Agency (NTA) and the Department of Higher Education, had on Tuesday, June 16, invoked Section 69A of the Information Technology Act, 2000, to restrict access to Telegram until June 22. This window covers the NEET-UG 2026 re-examination scheduled for June 21 and its immediate aftermath.
Soon after the order, both Google and Apple delisted the Telegram app from their stores till then.
A separate direction required Telegram to disable, across India, the message-editing feature for already-posted messages until June 30. The government said the feature had been used by cheating rackets to fabricate after-the-event “paper leak” evidence for national examinations.
Why the ban was imposed
The NTA said both measures were a last resort, taken after coordinated channel-by-channel takedowns led by the Indian Cyber Crime Coordination Centre (I4C) under the Ministry of Home Affairs failed to produce adequate compliance at the platform level.
State police forces in Bihar, Gujarat and Rajasthan had been acting on intelligence shared by I4C, taking down a “substantial number” of Telegram channels, groups and bots that openly advertised fraudulent access to the NEET paper.
In a notable instance, the Ahmedabad City Cyber Crime Branch arrested members of an inter-state gang operating eight such channels, with documented transactions of approximately Rs 1.5 crore routed through fraudulent bank accounts and around 1,000 mobile numbers contacted within a single month.
Among the channels named by the NTA were “PAPER LEAKED NEET,” “Re-NEET 2026,” “Private Mafia” and “REE NEET MAFIAA” – all of which demanded sums ranging from a few thousand to several lakhs of rupees in exchange for purported access to the re-examination paper.
“NTA places on record, and reiterates, that there is no such paper available outside the secured examination chain. The promise of any such material is, in every instance, a fraud,” the agency said.
NTA Director General Abhishek Singh told PTI there had been no actual paper leak and that authorities were dealing with fabricated messages being circulated online. “Since this was going on, it was leading to a lot of people being anxious and a lot of mental stress to students. We had to take this action,” he said.
The editing-feature restriction targets a specific exploitation. Channel administrators had been editing old, innocuous posts to insert the actual question paper after an examination, while retaining the original send-time stamp, and circulating the resulting screenshots as purported proof that the paper had been available beforehand.
Durov hits back, alleges Reliance-WhatsApp lobby
Telegram CEO Pavel Durov pushed back sharply in a series of posts on X, saying the ban “punishes 150M+ ordinary Telegram users in India — not the insiders who leaked the exam materials.”
“The ban hasn’t stopped anything. The leaks just moved to other apps,” Durov said, adding that Telegram had in recent weeks removed hundreds of channels sharing leaked exam materials and related scams in India, and was making the “edited” label more visible to prevent backdating scams.
Durov then went further, alleging that Reliance, which he described as partially owned by Meta, WhatsApp’s parent company, may have lobbied to have Telegram banned in India.
A senior telecom industry source dismissed the allegations as “fake news,” pointing out that Durov had conflated two entirely separate companies. Meta holds a minority stake in Jio, the digital arm of Reliance Industries Ltd (RIL), while the subsea cable operations Durov referred to are managed by Reliance Communications, a distinct entity with no connection to RIL.
“Meta is only a minority investor in Jio and has no role in its day-to-day operations or management. Conflating the two demonstrates either a lack of understanding of the sector or a deliberate attempt to spread misinformation,” the source told PTI.
The Internet Freedom Foundation (IFF) also criticised the government’s action, calling it “a band-aid solution” and “a disproportionate answer to exam fraud.”
The NEET-UG re-examination on June 21 has been necessitated after the original test, held on May 3, was cancelled amid widespread allegations of paper leak and irregularities, leaving lakhs of medical aspirants in uncertainty.
The NTA said the platform-access restriction would lapse on June 22, the day after the examination. The message-editing restriction, which it clarified would not affect the sending or receiving of new messages, would stay in place until June 30. Candidates were advised to rely only on official NTA channels for examination-related information and to report any fraudulent solicitations through the National Cyber Crime Helpline 1930.
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