The Internet Freedom Foundation has sharply criticised the Indian government's decision to block Telegram nationwide and compel the platform to disable message-editing for all Indian users, calling both measures legally unsound and constitutionally disproportionate. The restrictions, announced ahead of the NEET-UG 2026 re-examination, were introduced on the recommendation of the National Testing Agency and authorised by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology under Section 69A of the Information Technology Act, 2000. The Telegram block is set to last until 22 June 2026, while the feature-removal order extends to 30 June.
A Legal Framework Stretched Beyond Its Limits
Section 69A was designed as a targeted instrument. It grants the government power to block specific "information" hosted on a computer resource - not to shut down an entire platform, and certainly not to direct a company to surgically remove a product feature for every user in one country. The IFF's statement makes this distinction plainly: the Blocking Rules of 2009, which flow from Section 69A, do not authorise either of these measures as applied here.
The Supreme Court's 2015 ruling in Shreya Singhal v Union of India upheld Section 69A precisely because the provision was narrow and procedurally safeguarded. Extending its reach to justify a blanket platform shutdown inverts that logic. The IFF argues that the government has taken a provision validated for its restraint and used it to justify one of the broadest possible interventions - blocking a communication service used by millions of ordinary citizens, students, and professionals.
The message-editing direction compounds the problem. The NTA's press release cited no legal basis for it at all. An executive order requiring a foreign technology company to modify its product architecture for an entire national user base demands explicit statutory authority. None was identified. The IFF's position is straightforward: if such a power exists, the order must name it. If it cannot, the direction has no lawful footing.
The Government's Own Narrative Undermines Its Case
Perhaps the most striking aspect of the IFF's critique is that it draws directly on the NTA's own press release to demonstrate the block's disproportionality. The NTA acknowledged that targeted enforcement - channel-level takedowns of Telegram groups, bots, and accounts tied to fraud rackets - had "contained the harm" caused by leak networks. The agency's own account describes this targeted work as effective.
Under the constitutional test of proportionality, as articulated in Justice K S Puttaswamy v Union of India (2017) and applied to internet restrictions in Anuradha Bhasin v Union of India (2020), a restriction must be the least intrusive measure capable of achieving its aim. If the lighter instrument was working - and the government said so - the case for reaching for the heavier one collapses on its own facts.
The NTA release also acknowledged that the exam's security was "unaffected" and that no leaked paper existed outside the secured examination chain. The IFF draws the logical conclusion: what the block is suppressing, therefore, is not a verified leak but circulating rumour. Closing a platform to suppress rumour, when targeted blocking and criminal prosecution remain available, does not satisfy any credible proportionality standard.
Who Actually Bears the Cost
The IFF identified two populations harmed by this measure - and neither is the fraud racket it purports to target.
The first is NEET aspirants themselves. The block was announced in the final days before the re-examination, when thousands of students depend on Telegram for study groups, shared resources, and doubt-clearing forums. Disrupting access at this moment does not protect the exam; it disadvantages the very students the examination system is supposed to serve.
The second harm is structural. Platform-level blocks enforced through ISP-level DNS and IP filtering are, by design, over-inclusive. They sweep in lawful use - educational, professional, personal - while remaining trivially easy to circumvent. A coordinated fraud racket can migrate to a VPN or an alternative platform within minutes. Ordinary users, especially those without the technical knowledge to route around a block, lose the service for days. The measure punishes the compliant and barely inconveniences those it nominally targets.
The IFF's broader argument is about the source of the problem. Exam paper leaks originate inside the system - among insiders, across printing workflows, within logistics chains. The distribution platform is the most downstream element of that chain. Blocking it addresses the symptom at the furthest remove from the cause, while leaving the actual vulnerability untouched. Media attention directed at the ban, IFF suggested, risks serving as deflection from repeated systemic failures that will persist once the news cycle moves on.
Transparency and the Right to Challenge
The IFF raised a procedural concern that cuts to the heart of the rule of law: the MeitY order has not been made public. The Anuradha Bhasin judgment established that orders restricting access to communications must be published so that affected parties can challenge them in court. Neither the order itself, nor the reasoning of the review committee behind it, has been disclosed. It is also unknown whether Telegram was given any opportunity to be heard before the direction was issued.
This opacity matters beyond this particular case. Section 69A's blocking procedure includes safeguards - an inter-ministerial committee, a reasoned order, and, at least in principle, a right to contest. When orders are withheld from public view, those safeguards become procedural formalities rather than meaningful checks. The IFF called on the government to publish both the MeitY order and the NTA recommendation that prompted it, including the committee's reasoning.
The organisation's conclusion was unambiguous: a state cannot shut down a service relied upon by millions of citizens to answer the wrongdoing of a few, and it cannot do so through an order that none of those affected is permitted to read. On both counts, it argued, the government has done exactly that.
