Telegram’s old-message editing feature remains disabled until June 30 despite the app’s restoration on Monday midnight, a day after the retest of NEET 2026 examinations took place.Since then, the controversy has shifted to deeper questions regarding the app’s nature, its role in the country’s shadow educational economy, and why the government considered the platform uniquely risky in the first place.The app was taken down by the ministry of electronics and information technology (MeitY) under Section 69A of the Information Technology Act, 2000, upon recommendations from the National Testing Agency (NTA).Reuters reported that the home ministry’s Indian Cybercrime Coordination Centre submitted a 35-page report in court as part of the government’s defence of the temporary restriction, arguing that Telegram had not done enough to curb misinformation and fraudulent exam-related activity linked to the medical entrance examination leak controversy.Government’s concerns extended to Telegram’s privacy design, including features that allow users to interact without revealing their phone numbers, making identity detection harder than other widely used messaging apps like WhatsApp.

How students use Telegram

Telegram is popular with students because it works like a free, mobile-first study hub. Students use it to join public channels for notes, current-affairs PDFs, revision sheets, and lecture clips, and to join private groups for doubt-solving, peer discussion, and exam updates. It supports channels, discussion groups, pinned posts, large file sharing, and access across devices.

Students use Telegram for information dissemination

Students also use Telegram as a library. The platform’s searchable posts and easy forwarding make it a convenient place to store and retrieve study material, especially for competitive exam preparation where speed matters. In practical terms, Telegram often replaces fragmented WhatsApp forwarding chains with a more organised archive of lectures, PDFs, and revision content.“For me, Telegram acts as a supplementary academic tool rather than a replacement for standard sources. It also serves as a bridge between those who can afford expensive study material and those who cannot”, said Anurag Pandey, a UPSC aspirant.“Banning Telegram is not a universal remedy; there should be a strict standard operating procedure and clear punishment for those responsible for paper leaks”, he added.However, the same features that make Telegram useful for legitimate learning also make it an attractive platform for unauthorised distribution of educational content.

A clickbait on a Telegram channel

How paid educational content circulates for free

Subscription-based courses offered online range from thousands to several lakhs, depending on the programme, faculty, and duration.On Telegram, however, lectures from these paid courses are frequently leaked and circulated freely through channels, private groups, and mirror accounts, allowing users to access material without paying the original fee.This has turned Telegram into an informal redistribution network for premium educational content, especially in the test-preparation market where scarcity and high demand make such material highly valuable.The same pattern extends to current-affairs resources and e-newspapers. Many competitive exam aspirants rely on paid newspapers, magazines, compilations, and curated current-affairs PDFs that are normally protected by paywalls or subscription models. Yet these materials are often uploaded to Telegram in scanned, PDF, or forwarded formats and then shared widely at no cost. For students, this creates a cheap and convenient alternative to paid access. For publishers and coaching institutes, it represents a direct loss of control over content that was intended to be monetised.This dual use of Telegram has produced a divided response from coaching institutes. While some seem to be relatively lenient and see unofficial circulation as a form of indirect publicity, others drag the app to court.

Telegram’s copyright battles in court

There have been multiple instances when coaching institutes have filed cases against the app for copyright infringements.In 2022, Neetu Singh, a prominent educationist and author, filed a case against Telegram after her institute’s copyrighted educational material, including books and lecture videos, was repeatedly circulated without authorisation from multiple channels of the platform.The Delhi High Court observed that mere deletion of one channel was not enough, as new channels kept emerging. It directed Telegram to disclose the details of the channels and associated data such as emails, mobile numbers, IP addresses, and server-related information.Telegram initially objected on the grounds of privacy and jurisdiction, stating its servers were located outside India, and the disclosure would hamper the privacy of its users, but eventually complied with the order.Two years before the case, the high court had banned Telegram from broadcasting any copyrighted content belonging to a prominent coaching institute based in Kota, Rajasthan.

Premium content on free circulation

Since then, the application has become increasingly visible as an intermediary through which educational copyright infringement is being organised at scale, with multiple copyright-related lawsuits being filed against it.When a coaching institute creates materials like recorded lectures, study notes, test series, question banks, mock tests, E-books, and presentation slides, they automatically receive copyright protection under the Copyright Act, 1957.The act gives them the exclusive right to sell the material, reproduce and distribute copies, license access, create adaptations, and communicate it to the public.

India’s shadow education economy

Besides school and college, millions of students pay for private tuition, coaching centres, and exam preparation classes. It is most visible in competitive-exam ecosystems such as NEET, JEE, UPSC, SSC, banking, and state recruitment tests, where coaching is often treated as necessary rather than optional.As per the Comprehensive Modular Survey (CMS) on education, 2025, one out of every three school students attends private coaching.A 2021 report published in the South Asia Research journal estimates India’s shadow educational economy somewhere between $ 40-70 billion. Telegram adds a digital layer to an already existing market.It sits at the intersection of three aspects of the education economy: legitimate learning communities, paid coaching businesses, and third parties selling unauthorised content. Telegram makes the market more anonymous and difficult to police, allowing third parties to redistribute premium content without authorisation.The debate surrounding Telegram therefore extends beyond a single platform. It reflects larger questions about the affordability of educational resources, the growing dependence on coaching, the enforcement of copyright in the digital age, and the challenges of regulating online communities used by millions of students.The controversy has also highlighted a difficult balancing act for policymakers: protecting intellectual property and exam integrity while ensuring that students are not excluded from educational opportunities because of cost. Whether Telegram is viewed as a learning tool, a copyright challenge, or a regulatory concern often depends on which side of that boat one sits on.

Criticism of the ban

After the platform was banned, an X user’s post was retweeted by the leader of the opposition, Rahul Gandhi. The user claimed their brother’s paid NEET PG notes, videos and study groups were all on the app, forcing him to message pirates just to access what he already paid for.Gandhi’s post framed the move as a “new trick” to stop paper leaks, comparing it to “locking the victim’s door” rather than catching the thief. He also said that “lakhs of students” had been using Telegram for years for notes, test series, discussions, and preparation, so cutting access did not solve the underlying problem.“Most of my notes are in digital format. I uploaded them on Telegram so that I can access them at any time but banning it outright created frustration, lost access to my notes,” said Ravi Maurya, another aspirant.Pavel Durov, founder of Telegram, criticised the ban, calling it a punishment for over ⁠150 million ​app users, claiming the leaks would have moved to ​other apps.