The National Testing Agency (NTA) has stated that the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) has issued an order to temporarily ban the use of Telegram in India under Section 69A of the Information Technology Act, 2000.
This ban will remain effective until 22 June 2026, including the NEET (UG) 2026 re-examination and the period thereafter. According to NTA, Telegram has also been instructed to disable the facility to edit already sent messages in India until June 30, 2026.
The agency states that some individuals have been using this facility to create fake evidence of paper leaks in national-level examinations. This step has been taken to prevent such incidents and maintain the fairness of the examinations.
10 Major Points from NTA’s Press Release
- Before the NEET-UG re-exam scheduled for June 21, Telegram’s access in India will be restricted until June 22.
- Telegram’s message edit feature will remain disabled until June 30. NTA states that it was being used to create fake evidence of paper leaks. According to the agency, some people would edit old messages and add question papers or PDFs to them. Later, it was claimed that the paper had leaked before the exam.
- NTA said that action on Telegram was taken as a last resort. Prior to this, several steps were taken, including the removal of objectionable content.
- On Telegram, channels were operating under names like “Paper Leaked NEET”, “Re-NEET 2026”, “Private Mafia”, and “REE NEET MAFIAA”.
- On these channels, thousands to lakhs of rupees were being demanded from students and parents in the name of providing exam papers.
- The Indian Cybercrime Coordination Centre (I4C), in collaboration with Bihar, Gujarat, and Rajasthan Police, has taken action against several Telegram channels, groups, and bots.
- The Ahmedabad Cyber Crime Branch has arrested members of an interstate cyber fraud gang. During the investigation, 8 Telegram channels, transactions worth approximately 1.5 crore rupees, and about 1,000 mobile numbers have come to light.
- NTA acknowledged that the ban on Telegram might cause inconvenience to general users. However, this ban will only last until June 22. The disabling of the message edit feature will not affect normal chatting and sending/receiving messages.
- The agency has told students not to trust unconfirmed information circulating on social media. Information related to the exam should only be taken from neet.nta.nic.in and NTA’s official handles.
Re-exam on June 21, will be 3:15 hours long
NEET UG 2026 was cancelled this year due to a paper leak. The re-exam is now to be held on June 21, for which new changes have been made.
The National Testing Agency, i.e., NTA, has made some changes to the NEET UG re-exam. Under the new notice, the exam duration has now been increased from 180 minutes to 195 minutes. Additionally, space for rough work has also been increased in the answer sheet.
