India blocks Telegram ahead of NEET re-examination

NEW DELHI: India has taken the extraordinary step of restricting access to Telegram, one of the world’s most popular messaging apps, in a last-ditch effort to protect the integrity of its beleaguered medical entrance examination, NEET (UG) 2026.

The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) issued two sharp directives. The first, invoking Section 69A of the Information Technology Act, 2000, blocks access to Telegram in India until 22 June 2026, the day after the re-examination scheduled for 21 June. The second disables the platform’s message-editing feature across India through 30 June, closing a loophole that fraudsters had used to manufacture fake “paper leak” evidence after examinations had already been held.

The National Testing Agency (NTA), which runs NEET, welcomed the moves. The racket it was trying to crush had been breathtaking in its brazenness. Telegram channels operating under names such as “Paper Leaked NEET”, “Re-NEET 2026”, “Private Mafia” and “REE NEET MAFIAA” had openly solicited candidates and their families, demanding sums ranging from a few thousand to several lakh rupees in exchange for purported advance access to the question paper. NTA says flatly that no such paper exists outside the secured examination chain. Every such offer, it insists, is a fraud.

The message-editing feature was the fraudsters’ most insidious tool. It allowed a channel administrator to silently swap the contents of an old, innocuous message, substituting an entirely different PDF, for instance, while the original timestamp remained intact. The result was a chat thread that appeared to show the question paper circulating before the exam, conjured from thin air after the fact.

The Indian Cyber Crime Coordination Centre (I4C), under the Ministry of Home Affairs, had been running the counter-operation for weeks, coordinating with state police forces in Bihar, Gujarat and Rajasthan and monitoring public channels in real time. Its sustained pressure resulted in the takedown of a substantial number of Telegram channels, groups and bots before the platform-level action became necessary.

State agencies had already been making arrests. The Ahmedabad city cyber crime branch nabbed members of an inter-state cyber-fraud gang running eight Telegram channels, with documented transactions of approximately Rs 1.5 crore routed through fraudulent bank accounts. Around 1,000 mobile numbers had been contacted in a single month. Investigations are continuing in several other states. The Bihar police economic offences unit had issued a formal public advisory as early as 9 June 2026.

NTA acknowledged the disruption caused to the lakhs of legitimate users who rely on Telegram for personal, educational and professional communication, and expressed regret for the inconvenience. The platform restriction, it noted, is strictly time-bound and does not affect ordinary use for sending or receiving new messages.

Candidates are urged to rely solely on the NTA website, www.neet.nta.nic.in, and verified NTA handles for examination updates, and to ignore unverified content circulating on any platform. Anyone encountering fraudulent solicitations can report them to the National Cyber-Crime Helpline at 1930, or via cybercrime.gov.in. NTA’s own helplines are reachable at 011-40759000 and 011-69227700, or at neetug@nta.ac.in.

For the cheating networks that turned a national examination into a marketplace, the window has slammed shut, at least for now.