India Pulls the Plug on Telegram Days Before NEET Gets Its Second Chance

NEW DELHI — The Indian government restricted access to Telegram until June 22 — a day after the country's rescheduled national medical entrance test — saying cheating networks had been using the platform to spread fraudulent leak claims targeting candidates registered for the NEET-UG 2026 re-examination on June 21.

The block was enforced under Section 69A of the Information Technology Act, 2000, the same provision India used to ban TikTok and dozens of Chinese applications in 2020. The law allows the government to order platform takedowns without prior judicial approval when it determines a threat to national security, sovereignty, or public order.

According to the National Testing Agency (NTA), the restriction was triggered by what officials described as the "organised use of the platform by cheating rackets to defraud candidates." Targeted efforts to remove individual channels and specific content had failed to produce results, the agency said, without providing detail on the scale or number of channels involved.

The re-examination itself is a product of the original NEET-UG 2026's collapse. Authorities cancelled the first test amid allegations that papers were compromised before it was conducted — a controversy that drew protests across the country and put the NTA's examination security under sustained public scrutiny. June 21 is the second attempt to hold the test without incident.

Officials conceded the block would inconvenience millions of Telegram users unconnected to any fraud but said the action was unavoidable. Telegram had not responded to the restriction by the time of publication. Reliance Jio, Bharti Airtel, and Vodafone Idea — the three major operators directed to implement the block — also offered no public comment.

India is one of Telegram's largest markets globally by downloads, though WhatsApp remains dominant in daily active use. The NTA has not confirmed any verified compromise of papers for the June 21 re-test. The government has described the block as precautionary.