Hyderabad: Google and Apple restored Telegram on their respective platforms on Tuesday morning, June 23, as the government’s week-long ban on the messaging platform came to an end, though a separate order disabling the app’s message-editing feature remains in force until June 30.
The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) had blocked Telegram on June 16 under Section 69A of the Information Technology Act, on the recommendations of the National Testing Agency (NTA) and the Ministry of Home Affairs.
The ban came ahead of the NEET-UG 2026 re-examination held on June 21, after the platform was found to be systematically misused by cheating networks to circulate fabricated question papers and fraudulent content targeting exam candidates.
The original NEET-UG 2026 examination, held on May 3, had been cancelled by the NTA amid widespread allegations of paper leaks and irregularities. That matter remains under CBI investigation.
Before the ban was imposed, government officials had met Telegram representatives on June 3 and flagged these concerns. When the platform failed to produce adequate compliance, authorities moved to block it entirely — along with its associated web links and the web version of the app. Both Google and Apple delisted Telegram from their respective stores following the order.
NTA Director General Abhishek Singh said there had been no actual paper leak but that fabricated messages circulating on the platform were causing serious anxiety among students. “We had to take this action,” he told new agency PTI.
A parallel order requiring Telegram to disable its message-editing feature was prompted by a specific exploitation tactic, as channel administrators had been editing old posts to insert question paper content after an examination while retaining the original timestamp, then circulating screenshots as purported proof of a prior leak.
Solicitor General Tushar Mehta, appearing for the Centre in the Delhi High Court, said Telegram’s architecture made it uniquely difficult to police. A single account could create up to 40 bots, he said, and once a bot was blocked, it could automatically mirror to another. “Bots are machines; they can further multiply,” Mehta said, adding that law enforcement could not trace actual users because the platform operated through the cloud.
On June 19, the Delhi High Court rejected Telegram’s petition challenging the blocking order, clearing the way for the ban to remain in force through the re-examination. Justice Tejas Karia held that the government had strictly followed the procedure under Section 69A, that the emergency nature of the order justified the reasons supplied, and that the restrictions satisfied the test of proportionality.
Telegram had argued before the court that it had proactively taken down more than 900 links involving unlawful NEET-related content and deployed artificial intelligence tools to address the problem. Justice Karia had orally asked the Centre during the hearing whether the rights of 150 million users could be curtailed because one set of citizens was appearing in an exam.
Telegram founder and CEO Pavel Durov was sharply critical, saying the ban “punishes 150 million ordinary Telegram users in India, not the insiders who leaked the exam materials,” and claiming the leaks had simply moved to other platforms. He also alleged, without citing evidence, that Reliance — which he described as partially owned by Meta, WhatsApp‘s parent company — may have lobbied to have Telegram banned.
The Internet Freedom Foundation called the government’s action “a band-aid solution” and “a disproportionate answer to exam fraud.”
The NTA said that so far there had been no report of any fraudulent activity during the June 21 re-examination.
This post was last modified on June 23, 2026 10:47 am