A day after questioning the impact of a platform-wide restriction on millions of users, the Delhi High Court on Friday upheld the Centre’s decision to temporarily block access to Telegram ahead of the June 21 NEET-UG re-examination, ruling that the government’s action was justified, proportionate and backed by adequate reasons.

New Delhi, Jun 19 (PTI) A day after questioning the impact of a platform-wide restriction on millions of users, the Delhi High Court on Friday upheld the Centre’s decision to temporarily block access to Telegram ahead of the June 21 NEET-UG re-examination, ruling that the government’s action was justified, proportionate and backed by adequate reasons.

Orally pronouncing the substantive portions of the verdict, a vacation bench of Justice Tejas Karia said, “After considering all the arguments, we find that given the emergency nature, the reasons supplied are sufficient and the government has followed the procedure in Section 69A.”

Section 69A of the Information Technology (IT) Act, 2000 empowers the Centre to block public access to online information, websites or applications in the interest of national security, public order and sovereignty.

The court rejected Telegram’s contention that reasons for the blocking order were not adequately supplied.

Justice Karia said the Centre’s orders were “well-founded and supported by reasons,” and did not suffer from non-application of mind.

“Respondent 1 (Centre) was empowered under Section 69A to direct the blocking of access to Telegram. The test of proportionality is satisfied. The government's measures are the least restrictive. It cannot be held that the order is disproportionate,” Justice Karia said.

Telegram had challenged the government’s decision, alleging discriminatory treatment and violation of Article 14 of the Constitution on the ground that it was singled out among social media intermediaries.

The platform told the court that it had removed more than 900 links related to unlawful NEET content and deployed artificial intelligence, machine learning tools and manual moderation to identify violations. It also said it had held multiple meetings with government agencies since May and submitted detailed responses outlining its proactive and reactive moderation measures.

According to Telegram, it removed flagged content within an hour after receiving specific URLs from authorities on June 9.

During the hearing on Thursday, the court had questioned the Solicitor General on whether restricting access for over 150 million Telegram users was justified when only a section of students was appearing for the re-examination.

“How can we stop the rights of other users just because one set of citizens is appearing in the exam?” the court had said.

The dispute stems from the cancellation of the National Eligibility-cum-Entrance Test (Undergraduate), or NEET-UG, conducted on May 3 for medical admissions. The National Testing Agency (NTA) scrapped the examination on May 12 following allegations of a paper leak.

The case is currently being investigated by the CBI, while a re-test has been scheduled for June 21.

Acting on recommendations from the NTA, the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) issued an order on June 16 under Section 69A of the IT Act restricting access to Telegram in India until June 22, covering the day of the NEET-UG 2026 re-examination and its immediate aftermath.

In a separate direction, the government also ordered Telegram to disable its message-editing feature in India for already-posted messages until June 30, 2026. Authorities said the measure was aimed at addressing the platform feature allegedly used to fabricate post-facto “paper leak” evidence linked to national examinations.