India banned Telegram. The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) has announced a nation-wide ban on Telegram ahead of the NEET (UG) re-examination which is planned to be held on June 21, 2026 on the recommendation of the National Testing Agency (NTA). The ban is designed to crack down on any and all scope of exam paper leak, alleged or otherwise. The latter, which is rumour and misinformation, appears to be of greater concern as the NTA unequivocally states that “no such paper (is) available outside the secured examination chain” and that “the security of the (NEET) examination is unaffected by the action taken.”
But unlike the current sweeping ban on Chinese apps like TikTok and PUBG, Telegram isn’t going away forever. According to the official message of NTA, the ban will last till June 22 which is a day after the re-examination of NEET(UG). One particular aspect of the app – editing of messages – has been labelled individually and would stay unavailable for usage till June 30.
As these things typically do, the regulation has sent off a flurry of online discussions about censorship and whether such steps can limit paper leaks at all. There are some who are even wondering if it can be banned at all, due to the nature of the underlying technology. As it happens, the answer to each of these questions is not a simple yes or no. No. Rather, it is a maybe. We’ll just have to wait and see how it goes.
Q1: Why has India banned Telegram until June 22?
The move has been described as a “last resort” by the NTA after a series of takedowns of Telegram channels failed to curb instances of malice and fraud around the paper on the platform. The NTA says it has caught criminal actors operating under bold titles like “PAPER LEAKED NEET” and “Private Mafia” seeking hundreds to lakhs of rupees from vulnerable persons in exchange of alleged NEET question papers on tight surveillance.
The Telegram’s message editing capability is particularly interesting – and worrying – as administrators may quickly update previous posts and replace attached PDFs, all while keeping the original timestamp unchanged. According to NTA, miscreants would publish a generic message before the exam and change it after the exam to show the genuine question paper and then circulate screenshots as proof of early leak to create fear.
Q2: Is it really possible to completely ban Telegram?
That’s where it becomes complicated. The material Technology Act, 2000, Section 69A, from a legal point of view, empowers the government to ban certain material when there is possible threat to the security and sovereignty of India. The exact content of MeitY’s blocking orders has not been made public but in any case, a comprehensive platform ban is a big undertaking, especially in the case of Telegram which is basically constructed from the ground-up to defy censorship.
Typically, when the government bans anything, Internet Service Providers (ISPs) like Jio or Airtel block access via Domain Name System (DNS) filtering. DNS is like the phonebook of the internet. If an ISP is ordered to block an app or website, it would refuse to connect to their specific server ( s ) . Instead, it would inform you, the app or website doesn ‘t exist. It is simply a lie as the identical app or website will be accessible as soon as you leave the banned area or use a VPN.
Telegram is not your normal app, though. It sends encrypted requests to massive cloud networks like Cloudflare and Google, so it essentially hides what you’re searching for from your ISP. Even if ISPs use more sophisticated tools such as Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) to sniff out Telegram’s digital signature, or Server Name Indication (SNI) filtering to peek at your connection, Telegram can – at least in theory – bypass all that by disguising its traffic to look like normal web browsing using its custom encryption technology called the MTProto mobile protocol. Finally, Telegram has a notorious reputation of bouncing traffic around decentralised proxy servers, making it very difficult to pinpoint and block using normal means.
19-year-old viral cybersecurity researcher Nisarga Adhikary puts it best: “Blocking Telegram totally isn’t even possible, Telegram is designed in such a way which easily allows people to use proxies and other methods of circumvention.”
Q3: Can the paper leakers move to other apps like Signal and WhatsApp?
They absolutely can, and honestly, some probably will, a sentiment that Telegram founder and CEO Pavel Durov also agrees with in a sense. Soon after India’s ban on Telegram went into effect, Durov took to X and wrote: “This punishes 150M+ ordinary Telegram users in India – not the insiders who leaked the exam materials. And the ban hasn’t stopped anything. The leaks just moved to other apps.”
Be that as it may, the reason Telegram is under the scanner – specifically – is because its feature set makes it an attractive destination to disseminate information at scale – features that WhatsApp and Signal simply don’t offer yet.
For starters, Telegram allows public groups of up to 2,00,000 users and has massive file-hosting capabilities, whereas WhatsApp groups are much more restrictive. More importantly, Telegram features public search discovery, meaning a student can just type “NEET leak” into a search bar and immediately find a fraudulent channel. WhatsApp and Signal require phone numbers or direct invite links to join groups, making them much harder for random scammers to market heavily to the public.
Jasveer Singh (@jasveer10), Co-founder and CEO of Knot Dating, suggests Telegram is a haven for financial fraud, scam networks, betting groups, piracy, and other illegal activities. “Nobody is using Telegram in India for messaging. Telegram is mostly used by scammers in India. Most financial fraud (Billions of dollars) in India happens through Telegram. The Indian government should have banned Telegram years ago. It is long overdue. I’ve been noticing the same pattern for years,” he wrote on X, adding, “Almost every fraudster immediately moves to Telegram. It’s harder to trace, easier to operate”
Q4: What happens to the Telegram ban after June 22?
The good news for casual users is that this isn’t a permanent ban like the ban on TikTok. The NTA has been very clear that this is a “calibrated and time-bounded” emergency measure.
Because the strict restrictions are tied directly to the June 21 re-examination, the platform-wide access block is scheduled to lift immediately after the exam window shuts on June 22, 2026. Normal internet routing will resume, and you’ll be able to text your friends and access your study groups again. However, as a safety buffer, the message-editing restriction will stay active until June 30. This acts as a cooling-off period, ensuring scammers can’t fake post-exam narratives while the NTA processes answer keys and initial results.
Q5: Will this set a precedent for future platform bans?
This is the question that has digital rights advocates deeply worried. Historically, when Indian state governments wanted to prevent cheating during major recruitment exams, they would deploy localised mobile internet shutdowns turning off the internet for an entire region for a few hours.
Moving away from local infrastructure blackouts to a nationwide, platform-specific ban is different and far more concerning. While the controversial history of the NEET re-test might justify extreme security responses, groups like the Internet Freedom Foundation (IFF) are sounding the alarm. They’ve called the move a reactive “band-aid solution” that won’t actually stop exam fraud. Furthermore, the IFF warns if standard product features like text editing can be legally forced offline by a state mandate during an exam, it opens the gateway for routine, administrative censorship of the platforms we use every day.
Not to mention, the inconvenience it is bound to bring to those who’ve been using Telegram for the good reasons, as evidenced by this X post from Apurva Jain (@apurvajain24): “My brother’s NEET PG notes, videos and paid study groups were all on Telegram. Telegram got banned. So now he’s stuck messaging pirated-content scammers just to access what he already paid for. To stop one leaked NEET UG paper, you broke access for thousands of honest aspirants. The source of the leak walks free. The medium gets banned. The students get punished.”
According to Durov: “Over the past few weeks, we removed hundreds of channels sharing leaked exam materials and related scams in India. We’re also making the “edited” label more visible to prevent backdating scams. Telegram is a force for good. Banning it — even temporarily — is a mistake.”
