Daily Briefing: Centre blocks Telegram till June 22 ahead of NEET-UG 2026 re-exam

As Iran reached the locker room after their tense 2-2 draw against New Zealand at the FIFA World Cup on Monday, they were informed of a late change in their travel plan. They wouldn’t be staying in Los Angeles for the night, as was planned earlier, but would fly back to their training camp across the border in Mexico’s Tijuana. Iran’s war with the US has officially ended, with President Donald Trump announcing that the “deal’s all signed”. However, the battles that Iran’s football team has been waging in the tournament and its build-up continue. “Our team is the most oppressed one in the whole World Cup,” Amir Ghalenoei, the head coach, fumed before leaving for the airport.

With that, let’s move on to the top stories from today’s edition:

Telegram ban in India

Split in Shiv Sena (UBT)

More expensive smartphones and PCs in India

🚨 Big Story

The Indian government on Tuesday temporarily blocked Telegram, one of the most popular messaging applications in the country, with an estimated 150 million users, until June 22. The move comes after the platform demonstrated “non-responsiveness” in aiding the ongoing probe into the May 3 NEET-UG paper leak allegations and for curbing the spread of fraudulent claims of access to the June 21 re-examination paper by various handles on the platform. The platform’s founder, Pavel Durov, reacting to the announcement, said the Indian authorities have “punished” over ⁠150 million ordinary ​users in India. The ban ​has not stopped anything and the leaks “simply moved to ​other apps”, Durov ​added.

Rationale: The ban on Telegram applies till after a day of NEET’s re-examination, scheduled for June 21, following the cancellation of the May 3 exam. The platform is believed to have been used to circulate leaked questions and communicate with students, middlemen and others linked to the network. The government has also issued a direction to Telegram to disable its message-editing feature for messages already posted until June 30. This, the National Testing Agency (NTA) said, would address “the specific structural feature through which the platform has been used to fabricate after-the-event ‘paper leak’ evidence in respect of national examinations”. Here’s the rationale behind the ban.

Kota wants to be left alone: Even as senior Congress leader Rahul Gandhi is set to arrive in Kota on Wednesday to kick off his campaign on issues plaguing the education sector, and hoping to tap into public anger sparked by the NEET paper leak, the coaching hub has other things on its mind. Such as, the NEET re-test, scheduled for June 21. As Congress leaders set out to approach coaching institutes and students, there was more than a little consternation over the timing of Gandhi’s public engagement. The BJP had seized on this to mount protests in Kota against Gandhi’s interaction, accusing him of inconveniencing students. Even as the Congress emphasised there is no political angle to the event, the BJP has accused Gandhi of “politicising” student matters.

⚡ Only in Express

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After months of hostilities in West Asia, the Strait of Hormuz is set to finally open as part of a long-awaited deal between Iran and the United States. Aboard many of the merchant ships that sail through the busy shipping lane will be Indians, who form the world’s biggest seafaring workforce. With 3.08 lakh sailors as of 2024, India ranks among the top three global suppliers of maritime personnel, alongside the Philippines and China, holding approximately 17% of global crew share. Today, nearly one in five seafarers worldwide is Indian. In the recent war, 13 India-flagged vessels, with nearly 550 Indian sailors aboard, were stuck in the Strait of Hormuz for over 100 days. Across the broader Gulf region, more than 18,000 Indian seafarers were caught in the uncertainty. Despite the loneliness, the psychological weight of being at sea for months, and the risks, thousands of Indians continue to sign up for a career in the Merchant Navy.

📰 From the Front Page

Trust deficit: Prime Minister Narendra Modi, addressing the leaders at the G7 summit in Evian-les-Bains in eastern France, underlined that “mutual trust is the most important strategic asset today” and that the world “suffers from a shortage of trust.” Flagging the issue of the Strait of Hormuz and the death of Indians, including seafarers, in the conflict, Modi told them, including US President Donald Trump, that the “future of our partnerships depends on rebuilding trust”. Moreover, Modi and Trump are set to meet for a structured bilateral meeting on Wednesday on the sidelines of the summit. This meeting comes as India and US attempt to repair ties that were severely strained in 2025 following Trump’s claims of mediation between India and Pakistan post Operation Sindoor and Washington’s decision to impose heavy tariffs on Delhi.

Split buzz: As many as seven of Uddhav Thackeray-led Shiv Sena’s nine MPs are planning to split, according to sources, barring Arvind Sawant and Anil Desai. Several of the party leaders reached Delhi on Tuesday while Maharashtra’s Deputy Chief Minister and Sena leader Eknath Shinde left for the national Capital late in the night. In response, MP Sawant, on behalf of Sena (UBT), wrote to Lok Sabha Speaker Om Birla, urging him not to recognise any breakaway group of the party’s MPs. The rebel leaders are expected to submit a letter urging the Speaker to recognise them as a separate bloc in the House. The move comes just a week before the fourth anniversary of Shinde’s rebellion that split the Sena.

📌 Must Read

After Australia, now the United Kingdom has set out to tighten online safety for children, by announcing a ban on social media for under-16s by spring 2027. To understand the societal impacts of technology and social media, The Indian Express speaks to Ravi Iyer, Managing Director of the University of Southern California’s Marshall Neely Center, and a social psychologist. Iyer says, “As for fixing the problem, I think we need to start by listening to what users actually want — including children. They want to learn new things and connect with their friends. Do they really need to be constantly recommended to strangers? There’s a certain amount we want to use a product, and then we want to do other things with our lives. Companies are not respecting that boundary. And society is quite rightfully pushing back.”

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In our Opinion section today, C Raja Mohan delves into the lessons India can learn from China’s Cold Realism in its quest for diversification that’s now less between the West and BRICS than within the developed West. India now aims to deepen ties with Europe, the UK and Canada in the G7 through trade liberalisation. Raja Mohan writes: “Where many in Delhi’s foreign policy community see an irreconcilable contradiction between the pursuit of strategic autonomy and partnership with the West, China demonstrated the art of transcending it — and against far steeper odds… It is that cold realism that separates China’s hard-headed strategy from the perpetually prickly and anxious Indian foreign policy discourse.”

⏳ And Finally…

AI boom: Smartphone sales are beginning to hit a wall, thanks to the surging price of random access memory (RAM), which has more than tripled in value since October 2025. The biggest reason for this surge is the explosive growth in the data centres which power artificial intelligence (AI). It has triggered a global memory shortage by pushing chipmakers to divert production towards lucrative high-bandwidth memory used in data centres, leaving less conventional dynamic RAM (DRAM) available for smartphones and personal computers (PCs) and driving up prices across the electronics supply chain.

🎧 Lastly, don’t forget to tune in to today’s episode of our 3 Things podcast, where we discuss the rising number of brain-eating amoeba cases in Kerala; the challenges faced by Indian exporters amid the West Asia war; as well as the NCERT’s response to the Dancing Girl artefact of Mohenjodaro in its Class 9 Arts Education textbook.

That’s all for today. Have a wonderful day!

Until next time,

Ariba

Business As Usual by E P Unny