On June 14, four days before the University Grants Commission–National Eligibility Test exam was to be held, Vineet Pandey received several screenshots from his students.
Pandey is a Delhi-based English-language teacher who uses YouTube to coach students for the UGC-NET exam, a test to determine the eligibility of students aspiring to become assistant professors, PhD scholars and also to qualify for the junior research fellowship. His students had captured the images from channels to which they subscribed on the messaging app Telegram – on the channels, users claimed to have accessed the exam paper, and offered to sell it for between Rs 5,000 and Rs 15,000.
“The messages asked students to hurry because there wasn’t much time left, and shared a QR code through which students could pay,” Pandey said.
Pandey immediately shot off an email to the University Grants Commission, asking them to look into the matter. “There is a serious concern raised about UGC NET Paper-1 being circulated as a leaked paper,” he wrote. Pandey attached screenshots his students had shared with him and noted, “There is a phone no [number] and a QR code. These people can be nabbed immediately.” He did not receive any response.
On June 18, the exam was held as scheduled. The next day, the Central government announced that the exam had been cancelled because its integrity “may have been compromised”. Soon after, the minister of education, Dharmendra Pradhan announced in a press meet that the exam paper was leaked “in the darknet” and on Telegram.
It was the first formal acknowledgement from the government of the role that the app had played in the question paper leaks that have roiled the country in the past few weeks.
“Paper leaks have always happened,” said Dr Vivek Pandey, a doctor and right-to-information activist based in Madhya Pradesh, who has closely tracked the NEET medical entrance exam over the years. “It isn’t new. But it has never happened on such a large scale and this is the first time that they have tried to do it through Telegram.” He explained that this year, he saw channels claiming to offer leaked papers of the UGC NET exam, as well as the NEET undergraduate medical exam, and the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research UGC NET exam, for those seeking teaching positions and PhDs in the sciences, as well as jobs in government research laboratories.
A popular app
To those familiar with the country’s coaching and examination ecosystem, the fact that Telegram has become a platform where alleged leaked papers are widely advertised is not surprising given its popularity, and the specific set of features it offers.
Telegram was launched in 2013, and was soon widely adopted by Indian exam-coaching companies, who used it to interact with students. It saw a massive global spike in popularity towards the end of 2020 and the start of 2021. According to one analytics agency, in December 2020, it was the ninth-most downloaded app worldwide – the following month, it was the most downloaded app. It noted that India accounted for 24% of these more than 63 million downloads, more than any other country. Both Vineet and Vivek Pandey observed that they had seen a rise in the usage of the app in India through the Covid-19 pandemic, when the country also had a boom in online education.
Sonal Chaudhary, a NEET aspirant from Delhi, signed up on Telegram in 2021, when she began preparing for the exam. She said she began using the app while a lockdown was in place during the Covid-19 pandemic, solely for the purpose of accessing resources. “Everything is available on Telegram for free,” she said. “Online coaching platforms upload live classes, recordings, study material for everyone to access. It has been very helpful for me.”
The resources that are available include expensive books, courses and videos that are “made accessible to people who would otherwise not be able to buy it,” said Aakash Pawar, a civil-services aspirant from Delhi. Students Scroll spoke to noted that this included proprietary content that users uploaded, and that others accessed for free, as well as material that some coaching companies put out for free as a way to attract students. Pawar added that the app also had features such as a bot that could be used to set quizzes for aspirants to test their preparedness.
Pawar also noted that Telegram is particularly helpful to aspirants who wish to remain anonymous while they prepare for exams, because users can choose not to have their number displayed to other users. “Many don’t want their extended family to know that they are preparing for the exams in fear of the reactions of their families in case they don’t do well,” he said. “In Telegram, you don’t have to reveal your name or phone number, people can have secret chats, delete chat history. Aspirants can just lay low and still prepare.”
The dark side of anonymity
But these layers of privacy also draw to the app those who seek to misuse it. “Taking advantage of this, these groups have tried to lay traps to deceive students and force them to buy these papers,” Pawar said. He added, “Unlike WhatsApp, the cyber cell finds it difficult to find a person’s IP address or numbers through Telegram.”
Most users of the app are familiar with these risks. While Choudhary did not directly receive any information on her account or any channels about the paper leaks, she said that after the exam there were users on Telegram who claimed they could “modify OMR” sheets for around Rs 50,000. Several exams in India use answer sheets with OMR, or optical mark recognition.
The feature of Telegram that many teachers and students term its biggest advantage over other apps is that unlike WhatsApp, which allows a maximum of 1,024 members in any group, Telegram allows up to 2 lakh members.
This also makes it the platform on which leaks are most likely to occur. “Some channels have over a lakh of followers which is why the paper leaks could have happened so quickly,” said Vivek Pandey.
But, he explained, most of those offering to sell leaked papers were only seeking to defraud aspirants. “After news of leaks started making the rounds, people took advantage of it,” he said. “People who were selling it for small amounts were probably all frauds making fake claims.”
He added, “I know some students who actually ended up losing money this way. After they ended up paying, the person deleted the account and disappeared.”
He argued that quick action by the government to the alerts it received from students and teachers could have prevented the damage from leaked papers, as well as those who sought to defraud students. “We have a strong cyber cell, IT cell, we have enough power to take swift action,” he said. “We could have caught these scammers. Since the government has made no arrests so far, these gangs have no fear.”
Vineet Pandey is furious that the government did not heed his warnings. “What is the point of a public email ID when they won’t even respond to emergency emails?” he said. “Even if this was a rumour, why did intelligence not look into it?” Pandey said he had even run an email campaign before the UGC-NET exam and urged his students to alert the National Testing Agency about the Telegram messages. But the government did not respond to the emails.
Paney argued that the app itself could not be blamed for the problem. “There are a few people who are responsible for this and action must be taken against them,” he said. “We cannot demand that the app make any changes or blame it for the leaks.”
