THE GOVERNMENT Tuesday temporarily blocked Telegram, a popular messaging application, until June 22, after the platform’s “non-responsiveness” in aiding the ongoing probe into the May 3 NEET-UG paper leak and for curbing the spread of fraudulent claims of access to the June 21 re-examination paper by handles on the platform, The Indian Express has learnt.

Telegram is among the most popular personal messaging applications in the country, with an estimated 150 million users, behind only Meta’s WhatsApp, which has over 500 million users.

Pavel Durov, founder of the ​Telegram messaging app, said  that by temporarily banning Telegram ​in the country, ​the Indian authorities have “punished” over ⁠150 million ordinary ​users in India.

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The ban ​has not stopped anything and the leaks “simply moved to ​other apps”, Durov ​said.

The Ministry of Electronics and IT (MeitY) acted Section 69A of the IT Act at the behest of the National Testing Agency. It also directed the company to disable, in India, its message-editing feature in respect of messages already posted on the platform until June 30, to address “the specific structural feature through which the platform has been used to fabricate after-the-event ‘paper leak’ evidence in respect of national examinations”.

The Telegram app can, however, be used through a connection over a virtual private network (VPN).

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A senior government official said that in conversations with Telegram representatives in India, it was conveyed that the company should support ongoing probes into the paper leak, and subsequent claims, by providing metadata and other logs related to messages sent on the platform. Logs are information about messages and who sent them, and can include details like timestamp of a message, IP address, phone number, and device details, among others.

On why action was necessitated against only Telegram, NTA Director General Abhishek Singh told The Indian Express that the platform was not taking any “proactive action” to deal with channels claiming to provide access to the question paper. “We were playing cat-and-mouse,” he said about the NTA’s efforts to report channels claiming to have access to the NEET-UG question paper.

“They (the Telegram officials) told us that Telegram does not store logs and other related information related to messages, so they were unable to share any information with us. We also conveyed to their local representatives to involve their higher-ups abroad in the discussions, but they were non-responsive,” another official said on condition of anonymity.

According to Telegram’s privacy policy, if the company receives a “valid order,” from relevant judicial authorities confirming that a particular user is a suspect in a case involving criminal activities that violate the platform’s terms of service, it will “perform a legal analysis of the request and may disclose (the user’s) IP address and phone number to the relevant authorities”.

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However, Telegram also offers a service called ‘secret chats,’ which are essentially end-to-end-encrypted conversations, and the company does not keep any logs for messages sent under the feature, and as a result does not know “who or when you messaged via secret chats,” its privacy policy states. Such messages, according to the company, can only be accessed from the device they were sent to or from.

Queries sent to the IT Ministry and Telegram did not elicit a response until publication.

A second government official said the government had to resort to collating channels and accounts that investigative agencies believed were involved in either the initial leak, or were making subsequent claims about having access to the re-exam paper, and issuing takedown orders. “But that became an overwhelming task as such channels and accounts kept resurfacing each time we blocked them,” this official said.

There is acknowledgement within a section of the government that blocking an entire application may not prove to be a popular decision, and allegations of overreach could be made, especially given that the Centre, on a number of occasions in the past, has been criticised for its overtly sensitive stance on blocking of online content.

In a statement, the NTA said over the last few weeks, Telegram channels operating openly on the platform demanded sums ranging from a few thousand to several lakhs of rupees from candidates and their families, in exchange for purported access to the re-examination paper. As per the NTA, some of these channels were openly advertising their purpose through their names: “PAPER LEAKED NEET”, “Re-NEET 2026”, “Private Mafia”, and “REE NEET MAFIAA”. It clarified that no such papers were available “outside the secured examination chain,” it added.

According to the testing agency, the message-editing feature on Telegram, in its present form, permits a channel administrator to edit the content of a previously posted message – including the substitution of attached files such as PDFs – while the original send-time stamp is retained.

“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 NTA said.