On June 14, four days before the University Grants Commission National Eligibility Test exam was to be conducted, Vineet Pandey received several screenshots from his students.
Pandey is an English-speaking teacher from Delhi who uses YouTube to coach students for the UGC-NET exam, a test to determine the eligibility of students to become an assistant professor or PhD scholar and also to qualify for the junior research fellowship. His students had captured the images from channels they had subscribed to on the channels messaging app Telegram. 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 as time was running out and shared a QR code for students to make payment, Pandey said.
Pandey immediately sent an email to the University Grants Commission, asking it to investigate the matter. There are serious concerns over UGC NET Paper-1 being circulated as a leaked paper, he wrote. Adding screenshots shared with him by his students, Pandey noted: There is a phone number [number] and a QR code. These people can be arrested immediately. He got no response.
The exam took place as planned on June 18. The next day the central government arrived announced that the exam has been canceled because its integrity may have been compromised. Soon after, Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan said announced During a press conference it was announced that the exam paper had been leaked on the darknet and on Telegram.
It was the government's first formal acknowledgment of the role the app had played in the questionnaire leaks that have roiled the country in recent weeks.
Paper leaks have always been there, says Dr Vivek Pandey, a doctor and right to information activist based in Madhya Pradesh, who has closely followed the NEET medical entrance exam over the years. It's not new. But it has never happened on such a large scale and this is the first time they are trying to do it via 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's UGC NET exam, for those seeking are seeking teaching positions and PhDs in the sciences, as well as jobs in government research laboratories.
A popular app
For those familiar with the country's coaching and exam 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 it happened quickly Generally accepted by Indian exam coaching companies, who used it to communicate with students. It saw a huge global spike in popularity towards the end of 2020 and the beginning of 2021. According to one analytics firm, in December 2020 it was the ninth most app downloaded 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 noted that they had seen usage of the app increase in India due to the Covid-19 pandemic, when the country was also experiencing a boom in online education.
Sonal Chaudhary, a NEET aspirant from Delhi, registered with Telegram in 2021, when she started preparing for the exam. She said she started using the app while a lockdown was in effect during the Covid-19 pandemic solely for the purpose of accessing resources. Everything is available for free on Telegram, she said. Online coaching platforms upload live classes, recordings and study materials for everyone to access. It helped me a lot.
The resources available include expensive books, courses and videos made accessible to people who would otherwise not be able to buy them, says Aakash Pawar, a government aspirant from Delhi. Students Role spoke to noted that this also included proprietary content that users uploaded and that others could access for free, as well as material that some coaching companies released for free as a way to attract students. Pawar added that the app also had features like a bot that could be used to set quizzes for aspirants to test their preparedness.
Pawar also noted that Telegram is especially useful for aspirants who want to remain anonymous while preparing for exams as users can choose not to show their number to other users. Many don't want their extended family to know they are preparing for the exams, fearing their family's reactions if 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 and delete chat history. Aspirants can just keep quiet and still prepare.
The dark side of anonymity
But these layers of privacy also attract people to the app who try to abuse it. Taking advantage of this, these groups have tried to lay traps to dupe 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 of the app’s users are aware of these risks. While Choudhary did not receive information about the paper leaks directly through her account or through other channels, she said that after the exam, there were users on Telegram claiming that they could customize 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 cite as its biggest advantage over other apps is that unlike WhatsApp, which allows a maximum of 1,024 members in each group, Telegram allows a maximum of 2 lakh members.
This also makes it the platform where the risk of leakage is greatest. Some channels have more than a million followers and that is why the paper leaks could have happened so quickly, Vivek Pandey said.
But, he explained, most of the people offering to sell leaked papers were just trying to defraud aspirants. After news of leaks spread, people took advantage, he said. People selling it for small amounts were probably all fraudsters making false claims.
He added: I know a few students who ended up losing money this way. After they finally paid, the person deleted the account and disappeared.
He argued that swift action by the government on the warnings it received from students and teachers could have prevented the damage caused by leaked papers, as well as those who tried to defraud students. We have a strong cyber cell, an IT cell, we have enough power to take quick action, he said. We could have caught these scammers. Because the government has made no arrests so far, these gangs know no fear.
Vineet Pandey is furious that the government has not heeded his warnings. What's the point of a public email ID if they don't even respond to emergency emails? he said. Even if this was a rumor, why didn't the intelligence community look into it? Pandey said he had even conducted an email campaign before the UGC-NET exam and urged his students to inform 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 they should be taken action against, he said. We cannot demand that the app make changes or blame the app for the leaks.
