India’s Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology invoked Section 69A of the Information Technology Act on June 16 to temporarily restrict access to Telegram until June 22 – ahead of the NEET-UG medical entrance re-examination scheduled for June 21. The National Testing Agency requested the blackout, citing concern that bad actors were using Telegram’s message-editing feature to spread fabricated exam papers and fake leak evidence in a country where 1.8 million students were registered to sit the re-test. App intelligence firm Appfigures told reporters that June 16 marked the biggest single day for VPN app downloads in India since at least January 2025. Downloads of major VPN apps rose 49% from a recent daily average of 139,000 to 208,000. YourNewsClub spots that 49% VPN surge as the most commercially legible measure of how seriously Indian internet users took the block – not as protest, but as friction-reduction.
The specific numbers tell the story clearly. Proton VPN downloads on the Apple App Store in India jumped 113%. Turbo VPN App Store downloads rose 85%. NordVPN’s App Store downloads increased 41%. Proton VPN climbed from 18th to 5th in Apple’s Utilities rankings in India between June 16 and June 18. Proton reported that daily registrations from India rose 120% above baseline, after hourly registrations had already spiked 150% on Tuesday evening when the restriction took effect. Signal downloads in India rose 72% on the App Store and 322% on Google Play. Viber App Store downloads increased 216%. The Telegram-linked messaging app iMe saw its Google Play downloads jump from a recent daily average of about 827 to 50,900 on June 16 alone. YourNewsClub reads the iMe spike as the sharpest single indicator that users were not merely searching for VPNs – they were actively migrating to Telegram-adjacent services that the block did not reach.
The technical execution of the block attracted its own controversy. Doug Madory, Director of Internet Analysis at Kentik, reported that Reliance’s AS18101 network appeared to have hijacked BGP routes belonging to Telegram – meaning Indian ISPs did not simply block access, they apparently rerouted global internet traffic to enforce the order. That is a significantly more aggressive technical intervention than a standard DNS block, and it creates potential downstream effects for non-Indian internet infrastructure.
Telegram challenged the order in the Delhi High Court, with its lawyers arguing that authorities should target specific channels rather than block the entire platform affecting more than 150 million Indian users. Government lawyers, led by Solicitor General Tushar Mehta, defended the measure as a temporary and proportionate event-linked response, telling the court that while a permanent ban could raise concerns, the current measure had a “logical nexus” to its objective. Telegram stated it had already removed channels flagged by authorities. The message-editing feature restriction extends to June 30 regardless of when the access block lifts. YourNewsClub tracks the Delhi High Court proceedings as the most consequential near-term variable: if the court accepts Telegram’s proportionality argument and sets a precedent for targeted channel-level removal over platform-wide blocks, India’s Section 69A enforcement machinery changes structurally.
Maya Renn, whose work focuses on the ethics of computation and access to power through technology, frames what platform-wide blocks in high-stakes exam contexts reveal: “When a government blocks a platform used by 150 million people to prevent cheating by a fraction of that number, it shifts the cost of an enforcement failure onto every person who used the platform for unrelated purposes. The proportionality question is not rhetorical – it is a structural choice about whose communication costs are considered acceptable collateral.” Owen Radner, who models digital infrastructure as energy-information transport systems, draws the BGP detail into focus: “Routing manipulation to enforce a platform block is not the same as issuing a DNS takedown order. It affects global traffic flows, not just Indian endpoints. When a large national ISP hijacks global BGP routes, it does not just block Indian users – it can divert packets that were never destined for India at all.” Your News Club places the BGP interference allegation at the top of the international internet governance watchlist this week.