India shut down access to the messaging app Telegram across the country until June 22. The reason: stopping criminals from selling stolen exam questions.

The National Testing Agency, which runs India's major medical school entrance exam called NEET, asked the government to block Telegram. Police had discovered that organized fraud rings were using the app to advertise and sell copies of the exam before test day. The block was set to end one day after the retake exam, so crooks could not restart their operations before the test finished.

Why is this exam such a big target? In India, your score on NEET determines whether you get into a good medical college. That matters enormously for your career. So people are willing to pay money for leaked exam questions. Criminal networks know this and profit from it. Telegram made it easy for them because the app lets you create large channels and groups without strict identity checks.

The head of the National Testing Agency was honest about the limitations. According to The Indian Express, he said the ban is not perfect — people with the right software (called a VPN) can still access Telegram — but blocking it for everyone else makes it much harder for criminals to run their scheme. It is like making a product more expensive or harder to find: fewer customers can access it, so the criminals make less money.

Using network blocks for education policy is unusual and may attract criticism. Digital rights groups often question whether governments should use telecom rules to control what people can access online.

The real problem goes deeper. India gives these high-stakes entrance exams to millions of students every year. The National Testing Agency has faced complaints about how fairly it runs the test, especially after irregularities were found in past years. Ordering an app block to protect a retake exam shows that the agency's own checks were not enough to stop organized cheating.

What happens next depends on whether the National Testing Agency asks the government to keep the block in place or let it expire after June 22.