Telegram Ban in India: Temporary Solution to a Larger Problem?

Telegram has been temporarily banned in India. 

In a drastic move earlier this week, the Indian government has blocked the popular instant messaging service in a bid to prevent cheating and fraud during the re-examinations of NEET-UG. Authorities discovered several scams trying to sell “leaked” papers on the platform. 

The National Testing Agency (NTA) in a detailed post [pdf] said: “Over the preceding weeks, channels operating openly on the platform under names that themselves advertised their purpose – “PAPER LEAKED NEET”, “Re-NEET 2026”, “Private Mafia”, “REE NEET MAFIAA” and similar formulations – 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. NTA has placed on the record, and reiterates, that there is no such paper available outside the secured examination chain. The promise of any such material is, in every instance, a fraud.”

The move has drawn a sharp reaction with many believing that banning Telegram is a temporary fix to a larger problem. 

“The block of telegram is reactive and ineffective and will punish ordinary users instead of addressing the systemic source of exam leaks. This blocking comes in the final days of NEET preparation, when thousands of students depend on Telegram for study groups, doubt-clearing, and shared resources. Also, it is important to consider that the source of exam papers leak will occur from inside the system, among insiders and across the printing and logistics chain, with the platform being the most downstream channel for distribution. Hence, switching off Telegram, is merely a deflection from the repeated failures that will continue while media attention is directed towards this Telegram ban,” notes the Internet Freedom Foundation in its post. 

Telegram in nutshell 

For the uninitiated, Telegram is a messaging application akin to WhatsApp and Signal. Developed by brothers Nikolai and Pavel Durov in 2013, Telegram crossed 1 billion monthly active users globally. According to reports, India is Telegram’s largest user base with over 150 million users. 

Even as Telegram and WhatsApp are quite similar, there are quite a few differences. For instance, Telegram allows users to send larger files, ability to create groups with larger numbers, and make edits in a message without changing the time stamp. It’s also more privacy focused, making it easier for users to mask their identity on the platform. It also has end-to-end encryption, though not by default. 

To put things into perspective, there are a few things that make Telegram structurally different. One, anonymity at scale – you can run a public channel with lakhs of subscribers without your phone number or identity ever surfacing, so the admins running ‘leaked paper’ channels stayed completely untraceable. 

WhatsApp ties every group back to a SIM-verified number, which gives investigators at least one thread to pull. Two, Telegram allows large, uncompressed file transfers.

Three, and this is the real enforcement gap, Telegram has no registered office or compliance entity in India. 

When agencies route takedown requests through I4C channel by channel, there’s no local accountability forcing a quick turnaround, unlike WhatsApp, which has an India-based grievance mechanism the government can lean on. 

It is worth noting that a dozen countries have banned Telegram. This list includes China, Iran, Russia, Vietnam, and Pakistan, according to a list by Mappr. 

Durov has been quite vocal about the restrictions in India. 

“India’s IT ministry banned Telegram for one week because some users shared leaked exam questions. This punishes 150M+ ordinary Telegram users in India – not the insiders who leaked the exam materials. And the ban hasn’t stopped anything. The leaks just moved to other apps,” Pavel Durov wrote on X. 

Telegram has also moved the Delhi High Court against the restriction. According to a Livelaw report, the court has reserved its verdict on the move. 

Ban-daid

Telegram’s feature i.e editing of an existing message without changing timestamps has created quite a stir. 

Prateek Bhajanka, CEO at Field CISO Advisory and former Gartner Analyst, tells Entrepreneur India that it’s a typical case of vulnerability by the virtue of design. It was supposed to help the users correct their mistakes or typos or files uploaded but the nefarious actors started exploiting the functionality for malicious purposes. Telegram treats every message as an object and assigns a message ID which acts as the primary key, the message ID then gets associated with the files upload and the file ID. 

Now if the uploaded file is changed, the message ID will be unaltered and will start pointing it to the newer file ID. These backend changes will be transparent to the user. This capability violates some of the basic principles which we take for granted, integrity, traceability and accountability.

Though, it’s quite plausible for Telegram to disable this feature for a certain geography. 

As pointed out by several cybersecurity experts, banning an app may not be completely foolproof. For someone committed to malicious usage, they can look at alternative encrypted apps or simply find a workaround to use the app.

“It’s almost the same catch 22 situation we are seeing with Fable 5 and Mythos 5 ban, it was so difficult for Anthropic to implement that they disabled it for all users. Similarly, even if Telegram strips off the edit capability for India, a committed fraudster can easily bypass it using VPN, changing the base location of the phone or the operator himself/herself could be operating from outside of the country,” Bhajanka added.

Though a ban can temporarily reduce the probability of frauds by a significant amount. The ban is creating disruption in criminal’s modus operandi, which will throw them off for a few days before they come up with an alternative. 

Karan Gupta, co-founder at AssessPrep, tells Entrepreneur India that the government could consider moving away from physical logistics and advance printing altogether. Instead, the government can adopt assessment technology that delivers encrypted papers digitally just minutes before the test, unlocked only via unique student codes within secure lockdown environments.

“Furthermore, by utilizing dynamic, randomized question-banking with diverse question formats developed within secure, screenshot-blocked digital authoring environments, we can ensure that a single master ‘guess paper’ can never be pre-compiled or leaked in advance, protecting the integrity of the examination from inception to delivery,” Gupta added.

Ritesh Bhatia, Founder of V4web Cybersecurity, further stresses the need for more accountability. He also highlighted that banning an app does not eliminate the underlying threat; it merely shifts it elsewhere.

“By that logic, should we also ban WhatsApp because scammers use it for digital arrest frauds? Should we ban online banking because cybercriminals misuse it to siphon off money? The problem is not the technology. The problem is the misuse of technology. 

India wants to be a global digital powerhouse. A digital nation cannot keep responding to every challenge with a ban. It must build the capability to investigate, regulate, monitor, and enforce. The answer lies in stronger governance and accountability, not in switching off platforms whenever something goes wrong,” he argues. 

Bhatia added that a platform wide block is a blunt instrument, and the leak happened before it ever reached Telegram, so blocking the app doesn’t touch the actual source. 

What I’d rather see/do:

“First, a mandatory India presence and binding takedown SLAs for any platform above a certain user threshold, the same logic as the significant social media intermediary rules, so during sensitive windows like exam season or elections, flagged channels come down in hours, not weeks. 

Second, follow the money, not just the messages. These channels were collecting payment via UPI and bank transfers, and agencies can freeze those rails through NPCI and banks far faster than they can block an app for 150 million users. That’s consistent with what I’ve said before, fraud accountability sits with the intermediaries who control the rails, not just the platform the message happened to travel on. 

Third, targeted court-ordered takedowns of specific channels and admins instead of blanket access bans, so the students who use Telegram for legitimate study material aren’t collateral damage.”

“And the real fix is upstream, tightening custody and insider access controls around the exam papers themselves, because no messaging app ban stops a leak that already happened inside the system,” Bhatia concluded.