Telegram Criticizes India's Ban Amid Exam Leak Scandal

Messaging platform Telegram slammed the Indian government's move to temporarily block access to the app to prevent exam fraud, stating that it punishes 150 million ordinary users rather than those guilty of leaking the test papers.

On Tuesday, Indian authorities restricted access to Telegram in an effort to prevent exam fraud, after the cancellation of a crucial test last month sparked protests across the country.

Telegram will be unavailable until June 22, while its message editing feature will also be disabled until June 30, India's National Testing Agency said in a statement shared on X on Tuesday.

The move is in response to the "organized use of the [Telegram] platform by cheating rackets to defraud candidates," who will be taking a national entrance test on June 21, the NTA said.

The National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (undergraduate) or NEET-UG is a crucial exam for admission to medical colleges and was cancelled in May due to allegations of a paper leak, affecting millions of students.

Telegram is owned by Russian-born tech billionaire Pavel Durov, and it claims to have more than 1 billion monthly active users globally.

The government's move "punishes 150 million ordinary Telegram users in India — not the insiders who leaked the exam material," Durov said on his platform late Tuesday. He added that the ban "hasn't stopped anything," and the leaks have just moved to other apps. CNBC could not independently verify those statistics.

Over the past few weeks, government investigations found multiple channels on Telegram claiming to have access to leaked exam papers and soliciting payments "ranging from a few thousand to several lakhs of rupees from candidates and their families."

The NTA has said that no such exam paper is "available outside the secured examination chain," and claiming access to it amounts to fraud.

Last month, Rahul Gandhi, India's leader of the opposition, demanded 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 cancelled on May 12, following complaints of irregularities in the process.

A social media-first, mock political party known as the Cockroach Janta Party has also organized protests across India demanding accountability for the paper leak issue.