India has blocked Telegram. The reason is unusual: the government says the app was used to leak answers for a major medical school entrance exam, and it wants to stop cheating during the re-test scheduled for June 21. The block runs until June 22, when the exams wrap up.
As reported by Engadget, this affects roughly 84 million users in India, which is Telegram’s largest market. The decision has drawn sharp criticism from digital rights groups who say blocking an entire platform is a heavy-handed response to what is, at its core, an institutional failure.
To understand why this matters, you need to know a bit about the exam at the center of it all. On May 3, some 2.28 million students sat the NEET exam, India’s national medical school entrance test run by the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE). Many of these students had spent years preparing. This year, the CBSE rolled out a new On-Screen Marking system to handle the massive volume of answer sheets. The contract for that system went to a firm that was already considered controversial.
After results came out, students quickly noticed something was wrong. One student obtained a scan of his answer sheet and found it wasn’t his. He wrote on X: “I studied for an entire year. And now I don’t even know whether MY actual Physics paper was checked.” More complaints followed. Then another student claimed to have found security vulnerabilities in the marking portal and said he was able to log in and change marks.
On May 12, the National Testing Agency annulled the NEET results entirely. Investigators said they had found evidence that large sections of the exam paper had been leaked and shared on Telegram before the test. Telegram channels with names like “Paper Leaked NEET” were reportedly selling access to exam papers for cash.
The scandal quickly became political. India’s main opposition leader described the exam system as “broken and corrupt,” and the controversy fueled student protests against Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government. So while the Telegram block is officially about preventing cheating during the re-test, it’s happening against a much messier backdrop of institutional failure and public anger.
Critics are not convinced the block does anything useful. The Internet Freedom Foundation called it a “band-aid solution” and a “disproportionate” response. In a statement posted to X, the group said: “The block of Telegram is reactive and ineffective and will punish ordinary users instead of addressing the systemic source of exam leaks.”
That criticism is hard to argue with. Blocking Telegram for a week does nothing to fix the underlying problems:
- The controversial firm that won the marking contract
- The security holes in the marking portal
- The broader culture of exam paper leaks that apparently made entire Telegram channels viable businesses
Telegram has faced government pressure in several countries over the past few years, usually around content moderation or encryption. India’s approach here is different. This is a short-term, targeted block tied to a specific event, not a broader crackdown on the platform itself. Whether that distinction matters to the 84 million users who can’t access the app this week is another question entirely.