Anxiety and app bans as sweeping cheating scandal hits Indian students

IndiaAnxiety and app bans as sweeping cheating scandal hits Indian studentsAuthorities have thrown out students’ exam results and imposed a temporary nationwide ban on the Telegram messaging app, where papers were allegedly leaked beforehand.Listen to this article with a free account00:0000:00The messaging app was banned by the Indian government following the leak of a recent medical exam paper.Firdous Nazir / NurPhoto via Getty ImagesShareAdd NBC News to GoogleJune 20, 2026, 5:30 AM EDTBy Mithil AggarwalThree years of her life had come down to this one exam. Ridhvi Saxena, 18, walked out certain she was on track to become a cardiologist.Subscribe to read this story ad-free Get unlimited access to ad-free articles and exclusive content.That hope was shattered when India’s testing agency said the exam she had taken on May 3 had been compromised by leaks, ordering every candidate to retake it.Authorities this week went further and imposed a temporary nationwide ban on the Telegram messaging app, where it said “cheating rackets” were operating openly and selling leaked papers.“I feel very cheated on and betrayed by the system,” Saxena, a student based in the central Indian city of Bhopal, told NBC News in a phone interview.“I was excited for college,” she said. “I was excited for so many things, but then they just put me back into the zone in which I worked so hard to get out of.”She now feels “burnt out” and increasingly unsure of how she’ll perform on the retest, which is set for Sunday.More than 2 million students across India took this year’s NEET undergraduate exam, the fiercely competitive gateway to India’s medical schools. The three-hour exam, which tests students on physics, chemistry and biology in a multiple-choice format, is among the country’s most punishing tests along with its engineering counterpart, the JEE, both demanding years of near-total devotion.For millions of students like Saxena, who had already attempted the NEET last year and thought the May...