Banned For a Week in Bid to Prevent Another Paper Leak, Telegram Now Back in India
New Delhi: Telegram became accessible in India again on Tuesday (June 23), a week after the Union government ordered the platform's blocking in a controversial attempt to prevent yet another leak of the NEET-UG exam.
The platform sent messages to Indian users on Tuesday and early Wednesday confirming that it is again available in the country. “Thank you for your patience — and welcome back,” it said.
In the run-up to the NEET-UG re-test on Sunday, the Union government on June 16 invoked the emergency provisions in section 69(A) of the Information Technology Act to block Telegram in India until Monday as well as its message editing feature until June 30, saying users were circulating “false claims of an impending paper release”.
This would “create panic among students and parents, and will seriously hamper the integrity of the exam”, the IT and electronics ministry said in its interim order, citing the home ministry and the National Testing Agency as submitting that takedowns of individual channels were not effective and “nothing short of a platform-level measure will secure the examination”.
However Telegram approached the Delhi high court against the government's blocking order and argued that it had implemented proactive measures and that section 69A does not enable the government to take down an entire platform.
It also criticised the block as disproportionate. “Over 300,000 people die of drowning each year. In order to protect society, it is now illegal to consume or possess water,” it wrote on X last week in an apparent reference to the Indian government.
“Your government is also considering banning solid food, as it presents a needless choking hazard. You are not an adult. You are a baby. Eat the baby food,” it said.
Last Friday though Justice Tejas Karia of the high court upheld the block on Telegram, finding that the government had identified a legitimate objective for the move and adopted the “least restrictive measure available” given the “particular nature and architecture” of the platform.
Justice Karia's finding that the government can indeed block an entire platform using section 69(A), the Internet Freedom Foundation had said after the judgment, “sets a concerning precedent with consequences for the open internet that extend well beyond this case”.
Some 22 lakh students wrote the NEET-UG exam on May 3 but after it was found to have leaked, the National Testing Agency announced it would hold a re-test. The leak – not the first to have occurred in recent years – has sparked anger and calls for Union education minister Dharmendra Pradhan's resignation, including in street protests by the Cockroach Janta Party.
In other news, the home ministry's Indian Cyber Crime Coordination Centre (I4C) told the court during the government's defence of the ban that it is “proactively monitoring” groups on Telegram in view of the fact that some people used it to commit a variety of crimes, Reuters reported on Tuesday.
I4C had, according to the Union government's final blocking order cited in the high court judgment, reported that people use Telegram to share child sexual abuse material and deepfakes, perpetrate digital arrest frauds and sextortion, and deploy command-and-control malware.
Per its report submitted on June 10 the government expressed concern over the fact that users can communicate with each other over Telegram without sharing their phone numbers, Reuters wrote drawing directly from the unpublicised I4C document.
Financial losses to Indian nationals resulting from scams carried out via Telegram since 2023 amounted to around $750 million, the news agency cited I4C as saying.
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