Employees of the National Students Union of India (NSUI) hold placards depicting India’s Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan during a protest against the National Testing Agency (NTA) over the alleged leak of exam papers and the subsequent change in the dates of the National Eligibility cum Entrance Examination (NEET) in Hyderabad, Telangana, June 13, 2026.
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Indian authorities have restricted access to the messaging app Telegram to prevent exam fraud after the cancellation of a crucial exam last month sparked protests across the United States.
Telegram will be unavailable until June 22 and the message editing feature will also be disabled until June 30, the National Testing Agency of India said in a statement shared with X on Tuesday.
The move is in response to the “systematic use of the (Telegram) platform in fraudulent activities to deceive candidates” who are scheduled to take the national entrance exam on June 21, the NTA said.
The National Entrance Eligibility Test (Undergraduate) or NEET-UG, a key exam for admission to medical colleges, was canceled in May due to an alleged paper leak, affecting millions of students.
Telegram is owned by Russian-born tech billionaire Pavel Durov and claims to have more than 1 billion monthly active users worldwide. CNBC has reached out to Telegram for comment.
Over the past few weeks, a government investigation has found multiple channels on Telegram claiming to have access to leaked exam questions and demanding payments “ranging from thousands of rupees to hundreds of thousands of rupees from candidates and their families.”
The NTA said such exam papers were not “available outside the secure exam chain” and claiming they were accessible amounted to fraud.
Last month, India’s opposition leader Rahul Gandhi called for the resignation of the country’s education minister Dharmendra Pradhan following the NEET “paper leak” that affected 2.2 million students. The NEET-UG exam was first held on May 3, but was canceled on May 12 following complaints of irregularities in the procedure.
A social media-first fake political party known as the Cockroach Janta Party also organized protests across India demanding accountability for the paper leak.
Ashok Malik, a partner at the Asia Group, a public policy think tank, told CNBC earlier this month that the discrepancies in testing were “pretty dire.” “This is probably the biggest challenge the government has faced in the last 12 years,” he said.
