India temporarily blocks Telegram, claiming it was done to prevent exam fraud

Matt Cardy/Getty Images

India has temporarily blocked Telegram for a strange justification: test cheating. The government recently annulled the results of a key medical school entrance test because it said that the answers were leaked ahead of time on Telegram, The Financial Times reports. To preserve the integrity of the re-test slated for June 21, the government is completely blocking the messaging app until exams finish on June 22. 

That may sound like a terrible reason to block Telegram in its largest market — estimated to be around 84 million people — but there's more to the story. Apart from the leak, the exam system has been called "broken and corrupt" by India's primary opposition leader. That issue is what initially led to student outrage and protests against Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi. 

There's a good explanation for the so-called CBSE scandal (after India's Central Board of Secondary Education) at Al Jazeera, but here's a summary. Some 2.28 million students, many of whom studied for years, took the NEET medical school entrance exam test on May 3. This year, the CBSE introduced an On-Screen Marking system to better grade the millions of answers sheets. The contract for that system went to a controversial firm, and after the initial test, students found troubling discrepancies in their results. 

One student who obtained a scan of his answer sheet discovered that it wasn't even his. "I studied for an entire year. And now I don't even know whether MY actual Physics paper was checked," he wrote in a post on X. Other complaints followed, then another student exposed security vulnerabilities in the test marking portal and claimed he was able to enter the system and edit marks. 

On May 12, the government's National Testing Agency annulled the results, saying investigators found evidence that large sections of the paper may have been leaked and circulated on Telegram prior to the test. The NTA said that Telegram channels with titles like "Paper Leaked NEET" were offering exam paper access in exchange for money.

However, the Internet Freedom Foundation called the ban a "band-aid solution" and "disproportionate" response to exam fraud. "The block of Telegram is reactive and ineffective and will punish ordinary users instead of addressing the systemic source of exam leaks," the group said in a statement on X.