India temporarily blocks Telegram, claiming it was done to prevent exam fraud - Engadget

The platform will be unavailable until June 22 after a key test paper was purportedly leaked. India has temporarily blocked Telegram for a strange justification: test cheating. The government recently annulled the results of a key medical school entrance test because it said that the answers were leaked ahead of time on Telegram, The Financial Times reports. To preserve the integrity of the re-test slated for June 21, the government is completely blocking the messaging app until exams finish on June 22. That may sound like a terrible reason to block Telegram in its largest market — estimated to be around 84 million people — but there's more to the story. Apart from the leak, the exam system has been called "broken and corrupt" by India's primary opposition leader. That issue is what initially led to student outrage and protests against Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi. There's a good explanation for the so-called CBSE scandal (after India's Central Board of Secondary Education) at Al Jazeera, but here's a summary. Some 2.28 million students, many of whom studied for years, took the NEET medical school entrance exam test on May 3. This year, the CBSE introduced an On-Screen Marki