New Delhi: The Centre has ordered temporary restrictions on Telegram in India and told the company to disable its message‑editing feature for a short period, citing concerns about organised exam fraud ahead of the NEET‑UG 2026 re‑examination on June 21.
The directions came from the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) after recommendations from the National Testing Agency (NTA) and the Department of Higher Education, the NTA said. The limits cover the day of the exam and its immediate aftermath and are meant to prevent cheating and stop fake “paper leak” claims created using edited messages.
“NTA welcomes the directions issued today in respect of the Telegram platform in India. The directions, issued on recommendations of NTA, are calibrated and bounded in time,” the agency said in a statement.
NTA said the move responds to an organised campaign on Telegram that targeted candidates preparing for the re‑examination. The Indian Cyber Crime Coordination Centre (I4C), under the Home Ministry, has been coordinating with NTA, state police forces and MeitY to remove channels, groups and automated accounts that allegedly offered illegal access to exam papers.
Platform-Level Action Needed
The agency said individual takedowns of channels were not enough to stop the spread of fraudulent content at scale, so platform‑level measures were used as a last resort. NTA described the restrictions as narrowly tailored to impose the minimum disruption necessary to protect students and maintain public order.
“The directions are a measure of last resort, taken only after intermediate remedies, including the take-down action coordinated by I4C, had been pursued and had not produced, at the platform level, the response required to protect candidates in the run-up to the examination,” it added.
NTA accused several Telegram channels — operating under names such as “PAPER LEAKED Neet”, “Re‑Neet 2026” and similar variants — of asking for money from students and their families by promising exam papers. The agency stressed that no genuine examination paper exists outside the secure exam process and called these offers fraudulent.
Misuse Of Editing Feature
The agency also highlighted how Telegram’s message‑editing tool had been exploited in recent exams. It said administrators could alter older posts and swap attached files while keeping the original timestamp, making it look as if papers had been shared before a test. To close that loophole, MeitY has ordered Telegram to disable message editing until June 30.
“This capability has been used, in respect of multiple recent examinations, to fabricate after-the-event ‘paper leak’ artefacts: a channel administrator edits an older, innocuous message to insert the actual question paper after the examination has been conducted, and the resulting chat is then circulated as purported ‘evidence’ that the paper was in circulation before the examination. The MeitY direction closes this avenue of fabrication for the post-examination window in which such artefacts have historically been deployed,” the agency said.
NTA pointed to state-level enforcement steps already taken, including advisories from Bihar Police and arrests by the Ahmedabad City Cyber Crime Branch linked to alleged fraud on Telegram. The agency confirmed the NEET‑UG 2026 re‑examination will proceed on June 21 as scheduled and urged candidates to follow only official NTA channels for updates.
