New Delhi, June 17 (IANS) The Delhi High Court on Wednesday sought the Centre’s response on a plea filed by messaging platform Telegram challenging the government’s decision to temporarily suspend its services across India ahead of the NEET (UG) 2026 re-examination scheduled for June 21.

Issuing notice on the writ petition, the vacation bench of Justice Tejas Karia granted liberty to the respondents (authorities) to file their reply along with relevant documents and posted the matter for further hearing on Thursday at 2.30 p.m.

“We have heard the learned senior counsel for the petitioner as well as learned Solicitor General Tushar Mehta. Respondents are at liberty to file their reply along with all the documents,” the Delhi HC ordered.

The matter was taken up after Telegram mentioned the case before the vacation bench earlier in the day, seeking an urgent hearing. Telegram has challenged the restrictions imposed pursuant to directions issued by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) under Section 69A of the Information Technology Act, 2000, following recommendations made by the National Testing Agency (NTA).

The Union government on Tuesday announced a temporary restriction on Telegram’s operations in India until June 22, covering the examination day and its immediate aftermath, as part of efforts to prevent alleged paper leaks, misinformation campaigns and cheating networks ahead of the NEET (UG) 2026 re-examination scheduled for June 21. According to the NTA, the temporary restriction became necessary after other measures, including channel-specific takedowns and enforcement actions, were found insufficient to address the scale of the problem.

Apart from restricting access to the platform, authorities also directed Telegram to disable its message-editing feature in India till June 30. The NTA claimed that the feature had previously been misused to create fabricated evidence of question paper leaks by editing older messages and replacing attachments while retaining the original timestamp.

The NTA said several Telegram channels operating under names such as “Paper Leaked NEET”, “Re-NEET 2026” and “Private Mafia” had allegedly been demanding payments from candidates in exchange for purported access to examination papers.

Meanwhile, Telegram founder and CEO Pavel Durov criticised the temporary suspension, saying it had affected more than 150 million users in India. In a post on X, Durov said Telegram had already removed hundreds of channels in recent weeks that were allegedly involved in sharing leaked examination materials and running scams targeting students in India. He also said the company was working to make the “edited” label on messages more prominent to prevent backdating scams and manipulation of content timestamps. The remarks came as Google and Apple removed Telegram from their respective app stores in India in compliance with the government’s directive.

The NEET (UG) 2026 re-examination is being conducted following allegations of question paper leaks during the original examination held on May 3.

–IANS

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