Following India's temporary restrictions on Telegram due to exam-related fraud risks, local users quickly turned to VPNs and alternative apps. Several data and service providers reported a significant increase in VPN downloads and registrations in the Indian market after the restrictions were announced, while Telegram's usage did not immediately decline.
VPN rankings are rising rapidly.
According to Appfigures data, between June 16 and 18, Proton VPN rose from 18th to 5th place in the "Tools" category on the Indian Apple App Store, and from 8th to 2nd place in the "Tools" category on Google Play.
Proton reported that daily registrations from India on Wednesday were 120% above the baseline. On Tuesday evening, following the announcement of restrictions, hourly registrations briefly rose to 150% above the baseline.
Canadian VPN provider Windscribe also told TechCrunch that peak user registrations in India were about 100% higher than usual, and its iOS app saw an 89% increase in first-time downloads.
The restrictions are related to the exam incident.
The Indian government had previously decided to temporarily restrict Telegram until June 22. The official reason given was that scammers might use the platform to distribute fake exam papers and commit related fraud before the make-up exams for undergraduate medical entrance examinations in India.
This exam is one of the most popular entrance exams in India. The government stated that the temporary restrictions are intended to curb the spread of fake exam questions and related fraudulent activities.
Telegram has filed an objection with the Delhi High Court, arguing that regulators should take action against specific content rather than blocking the entire platform.
Telegram activity actually increased
Despite the access restrictions, Telegram's activity in India did not immediately decline. Sensor Tower reported that on the day the restrictions were announced, Telegram's daily active users in India increased by 17% compared to the previous day, marking the largest single-day increase in the region since the widespread outage of Meta's services in 2021.
Lai Yi Ohlsen, head of Cloudflare Radar, also stated that within two days of the measures being announced, DNS requests to Telegram-related domains in India increased significantly. However, Cloudflare also cautioned that an increase in DNS requests does not necessarily mean that users have successfully accessed the platform; it could simply be due to repeated connection attempts after being blocked.
The court is expected to make a ruling on Friday.
During a hearing this week at the Delhi High Court, Telegram stated that it had removed the channels identified by regulators and questioned the necessity of imposing restrictions on the entire platform. The company stated that Telegram has over 150 million users in India.
Indian government lawyers argued that this was a temporary measure directly related to the make-up exam incident. Indian Deputy Attorney General Tushar Mehta stated in court that a permanent ban might involve proportionality issues, but the current restrictions were "reasonably linked" to the government's desired objectives.
After hearing statements from both sides on Thursday, the Delhi High Court has reserved its decision and is expected to announce its findings on Friday.
