On June 16, 2026, the Government of India directed all internet service providers to block Telegram across the country, and the block is scheduled to lift on June 22, one day after the NEET re-examination on June 21.
The stated reason is that Telegram channels were operating as cheating rackets, selling allegedly leaked NEET 2026 re-exam papers for amounts as high as ₹10 lakh. That is the official version, but the real story is that the original NEET 2026 exam, conducted on May 3, had to be cancelled after a genuine paper leak, and over 2.27 million students were affected. The leak compromised the entire examination, and the solution our government has arrived at for the re-exam is not better exam security, not better invigilation, not stronger encryption of question papers, but a nationwide block of Telegram for six days.
Six days of blackout on one of the most widely used business and communication platforms in the country, just because the National Testing Agency could not keep its own question paper safe.
I run Saurally Solar, a solar products manufacturing company, and for the last few days my factory has been running on email. It has not been going well, and I wanted to share what is actually happening on the ground, because I think a lot of people don't realise how deep this disruption goes for small businesses like ours.
Telegram Is Not Just a Messaging App for Us, It Is the Factory
Most people think of Telegram as something you use to chat with friends or share memes, but for small and medium businesses in India, especially manufacturing operations like mine, Telegram is something else entirely. It is the central nervous system of our day-to-day work.
Over the last few years we built our entire factory workflow around it — not casually but deliberately — because Telegram offers something no other platform offers at the same price. It gives us free unlimited file uploads, robust bots, a clean API, large group support, and a notification system that actually works on the cheap Android phones used by our factory workers.
Here is what runs on Telegram at Saurally Solar.
Customer chat runs on Telegram. When a customer wants to reach us about an order, a query, or a complaint, they ping us on Telegram and we respond from the same workflow we use for production. There is no separate ticketing system, no separate inbox, and no delay in routing the customer to the right person internally.
Website orders come in through bots. Every time a customer places an order on our website, a custom middleware we built pushes the order details into a Telegram channel, and my production team sees it in real time. They acknowledge it, assign it, and start working on it immediately. The order pings on every relevant phone within seconds.
Packing photos and weight discrepancies are handled in Telegram. Before any shipment leaves the factory, the packer photographs the parcel, posts it in the dispatch group, and logs the weight. If something does not match the order specification, my team flags it instantly, and disputes that used to take a day to resolve over phone calls now get sorted in five minutes with a photo and a reply.
Worker attendance, daily progress, and payslips are generated through bots. Workers mark attendance via Telegram, end-of-day production numbers go into the system the same way, and payslips are sent out as PDF documents directly to each worker.
Night-time camera movement is detected and notified on Telegram. Our factory CCTV is integrated with a motion-detection system, and any unusual movement after working hours triggers an automatic alert with a snapshot to a security group.
Our Kanban board for the order pipeline is linked to Telegram. Every stage — from order received, to production, to QC, to packing, to dispatch — pings the relevant group, and everyone knows what is moving and where it is stuck. No daily standup meetings, no Excel sheets emailed around.
Shipping labels from Amazon, our WooCommerce site, and other channels are dropped into Telegram for the team to process, and this alone saves us hours every day.
And there are dozens of smaller flows on top of this — vendor communication, inventory alerts, machine maintenance reminders, raw material reorder triggers — all running on Telegram. When Telegram works, the factory hums. When Telegram is blocked, everything slows to a crawl.
What Happened on June 16
The morning the ban kicked in, I knew something was off because none of my bots were pushing alerts, and I assumed it was a technical glitch on our side. We restarted servers, checked the middleware, and found nothing wrong.
Then a worker messaged me on WhatsApp asking why he could not open Telegram, and then another, and then I checked the news. Within an hour we knew what had happened — Telegram had been blocked at the ISP level across the country. Some of our team could still access it via VPN, but most of our workers, the people on the factory floor, cannot. Their phones are entry-level Androids, they do not have VPNs, they do not know what a VPN is, and honestly they should not have to.
So we did what we had to do — we switched everything to email and WhatsApp, the backup systems we had on paper but had never been forced to actually rely on. It has been clumsy, it has been slow, and it has been expensive.
Email Is Not a Substitute, It Was Never Designed to Be
Here is what email cannot do well no matter how much you try.
Email cannot handle ten thousand small notifications per day. Telegram bots can post, reply, edit, and attach files without flooding anyone, but email queues quickly become unreadable, important things get buried, workers stop checking, and the whole notification system collapses under its own weight.
Email is slow, and there is no other way to say it. By the time a packing photo reaches my dispatch supervisor and he replies, fifteen minutes have passed. On Telegram this happens in fifteen seconds.
Email is unforgiving. If someone replies to the wrong thread or forgets to CC the right person, work stops. With Telegram groups the entire team sees everything and coordination is automatic.
Email attachments are restricted. Many of our shipping labels, packing photos, and worker submissions are over the size limits that small SMTP servers impose. We have had to split files, compress images, and lose quality — all because the channel cannot handle what it used to handle.
Email is not real-time, but manufacturing is real-time. When a worker is standing in front of a machine waiting for confirmation to proceed, he cannot wait six minutes for an email to load.
We have been muddling through, but the cost is real. Orders are slower, disputes take longer, the camera system is sending alerts only to phones with VPN access which means most of the night security network is functionally offline, the Kanban pipeline is out of sync with reality, and payslip generation has been postponed. Even our customer chat has taken a hit, because customers who used to ping us on Telegram for quick clarifications are now waiting on email replies that take much longer to turn around.
In a six-day window we have lost a measurable amount of productivity. I am not going to put a number on it publicly, but it is enough to hurt.
And It Is Not Just Us
I know dozens of small and medium businesses in Bangalore alone that are in the same situation. Logistics companies whose entire route coordination runs on Telegram, coaching centres who send lectures and notes through Telegram channels, D2C brands whose customer service bots live on Telegram, hardware import-export businesses, neighbourhood retailers — all dependent on Telegram in ways that are not visible from the outside but absolutely essential to how they work day-to-day.
Multiply our productivity hit across all of them, across six days, across an entire country. That is the real cost of this ban, and it is being paid by people who had nothing to do with the NEET paper leak.
The Government Has Solved the Wrong Problem
Let me say this clearly, because I do not want to come across as someone who is dismissing the NEET issue. The NEET paper leak is a serious problem — a national medical entrance exam taken by over 2.27 million aspirants had to be cancelled because of leaks and irregularities, and these students lost months, some lost a year, and many are still in agony waiting for the re-exam. They deserve answers and accountability, and I fully support that.
But blocking Telegram is not the answer.
The leak did not happen on Telegram — it happened somewhere in the exam logistics chain, at a printing press, at a storage centre, at a transport point, or inside the NTA itself. Telegram is just where the leaked papers got distributed afterwards. Blocking Telegram does not fix the leak, it only stops one of many channels through which leaked content can flow. The people running cheating rackets will simply move to Signal, Discord, WhatsApp, or any of a dozen other platforms, and they already have. The cybercrime authorities have not even verified a genuine leak this time, and most of the channels were apparently selling fake papers.
Meanwhile the cost of this blunt instrument is being absorbed by businesses, students, families, and small operators who use Telegram for completely legitimate and productive purposes. This is what happens when a government department fails at its core job of securing an exam paper, and then tries to cover the failure by reaching for the biggest, loudest, and most visible action available. Block an app, make headlines, tell the public you took strong action, and quietly hope no one asks why the paper got leaked in the first place.
I do not say this with anger but with a real concern: a ban is not policy, a ban is a public-relations move, and we deserve better thinking from our policymakers.
What I Would Humbly Request from the Government
I am not against regulation and I am not against accountability for messaging platforms. If Telegram refuses to take down channels selling stolen exam papers, there is a real conversation to have about how India should respond — Telegram has no India office and has long been difficult to regulate or hold accountable for criminal use of its features. That is a legitimate concern, and I do not dismiss it.
But the conversation needs to be smarter than a blanket six-day blackout.
We could hold the platform to formal legal compliance, set up Indian liaison offices for major platforms, create a fast-track mechanism for taking down specific criminal channels within hours and not days, invest in actual exam security like encrypted question papers, biometric chain-of-custody, tamper-evident packaging, and randomised distribution — and punish the leak source rather than the post-leak distribution channel.
And while we are at it, I would gently ask the government to recognise that hundreds of thousands of small Indian businesses have built their operations on these platforms because no Indian-made alternative offers what they need at a price they can afford. Every time the government breaks one of these tools without warning, real money disappears from real factories, and we have very little protection or recourse.
Six Days Is What It Took
Telegram will be back on June 22, my factory will resume normal operations, and the dent in our productivity this week will heal in a few days. We are lucky because we are big enough to absorb the hit. But this is the lesson I am taking away from the whole episode.
The Indian state can, with no warning and no consultation, switch off a piece of infrastructure that thousands of businesses depend on. There was no advance notice, no migration window, no impact assessment on small business owners — only the announcement and then silence. If the goal was to teach Telegram a lesson, I do not know whether the platform learned anything, but Indian businesses certainly did. We learned that we cannot rely on any single foreign platform no matter how convenient, because at any moment a government department's failure can become our problem.
I hope the NEET re-exam goes well on June 21. I hope no paper leaks, and I hope every student gets a fair chance. And I hope, in the meantime, that the next time someone in Delhi reaches for the "block this app" button, they pause for a moment and think about the factory worker in Bangalore who cannot mark his attendance, the dispatch supervisor who cannot see his packing photo, the customer waiting for a chat reply that is taking far too long, and the small business owner refreshing his email for the hundredth time waiting for an order acknowledgement that used to take seconds. We are out here too, we exist, and we would humbly request that our work and our livelihoods are not treated as collateral damage in someone else's PR cleanup.