NTA STATEMENT REGARDING THE ACTION ON TELEGRAM PLATFORM IN INDIA 1. The National Testing Agency (NTA) welcomes the directions issued today in respect of the Telegram platform in India. The directions, issued on recommendations of NTA are calibrated and bounded in time: (a) a direction under Section 69 A of the Information Technology Act, 2000, restricting access to the Telegram platform in India for a defined and limited period ending 22 June 2026, covering the day of the NEET (UG) 2026 re-examination and its immediate aftermath; and (b) a direction requiring the platform to disable, in India, the message-editing feature in respect of messages already posted, for a defined period ending 30 June 2026, addressing the specific structural feature through which the platform has been used to fabricate after-the-event “paper leak” evidence in respect of national examinations. Both measures have been taken in the interest of public order, in response to the organised use of the platform by cheating rackets to defraud candidates appearing for the NEET (UG) 2026 re-examination scheduled on 21 June 2026. NTA expresses its gratitude to the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology for this timely action, in the interest of students, which will go a long way in helping NTA to be able to conduct safe and secure examinations on 21st June 2026. 2. Throughout the period leading up to the present action, the Indian Cyber Crime Coordination Centre (I4C), under the Ministry of Home Affairs, has served as the principal nodal agency coordinating the operational response to the Telegram-based fraud and misinformation targeting NEET (UG) 2026 candidates. Acting on inputs received continuously from NTA, from State law-enforcement agencies including the police forces of Bihar, Gujarat and Rajasthan, and from its own continuous monitoring of public channels and platforms, I4C has secured the prompt take-down of a substantial number of Telegram channels, groups and bots whose names and content openly advertised their fraudulent and misleading purpose. This was done with active support of Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology. NTA places on record that the intelligence-sharing and coordinated take-down action led by the Ministry of Home Affairs, through I4C, and MeitY has been continuous, prompt and substantive, and remains the operational backbone of the response. This sustained inter-agency effort, well in advance of the present platform-level action, is the reason the harm caused by these rackets has been contained to the extent it has. 3. The directions issued today by MeitY have been made following references by NTA and the Department of Higher Education, Ministry of Education, drawing attention to the structural limits of channel-by-channel action and seeking graduated platform-level compliance. The directions are a measure of last resort, taken only after intermediate remedies, including the take-down action coordinated by I4C, had been pursued and had not produced, at the platform level, the response required to protect candidates in the run-up to the examination. The calibration of the directions - a narrow platform-access restriction confined to the examination window, together with a feature-specific compliance direction for the post-examination period - reflects an effort to address the public-order concern with the minimum restriction necessary. 4. Over the preceding weeks, channels operating openly on the platform under names that themselves advertised their purpose - “PAPER LEAKED NEET”, “Re-NEET 2026”, “Private Mafia”, “REE NEET MAFIAA” and similar formulations - demanded sums ranging from a few thousand to several lakhs of rupees from candidates and their families, in exchange for purported access to the re-examination paper. NTA has placed on the record, and reiterates, that there is no such paper available outside the secured examination chain. The promise of any such material is, in every instance, a fraud. 5. The direction requiring Telegram to disable its message-editing feature in India through 30 June 2026 addresses a separate but related concern. The feature, in its present form, permits a channel administrator to edit the content of a previously posted message - including the substitution of attached files such as PDFs - while the original send-time stamp is retained. This capability has been used, in respect of multiple recent examinations, to fabricate after-the-event “paper leak” artefacts: a channel administrator edits an older, innocuous message to insert the actual question paper after the examination has been conducted, and the resulting chat is then circulated as purported “evidence” that the paper was in circulation before the examination. The MeitY direction closes this avenue of fabrication for the post-examination window in which such artefacts have historically been deployed. 6. Independent action by State law-enforcement agencies has, over the same period, reinforced the scale and seriousness of the concern. The Bihar Police Economic Offences Unit issued a formal public advisory on 9 June 2026, warning candidates against fraudulent claims of pre-examination access to the paper circulated through Telegram and other platforms. The Ahmedabad City Cyber Crime Branch arrested members of an inter-State cyber-fraud gang found to be operating eight Telegram channels in furtherance of the same modus operandi, with documented transactions of approximately ₹1.5 crore routed through fraudulent bank accounts and approximately one thousand mobile numbers contacted in a single month. Investigations are in progress in multiple other States. 7. NTA acknowledges that the access restriction issued by MeitY affects lakhs of citizens who use the Telegram platform for legitimate personal, educational, professional and informational purposes, and sincerely regrets the inconvenience caused to them. The access restriction is, by its express terms, confined to the period ending 22 June 2026 - i.e. the day after the examination. The feature-specific direction in respect of the message-editing function, which remains in force through 30 June 2026, does not affect ordinary use of the platform for sending or receiving new messages. 8. The NEET (UG) 2026 re-examination will be conducted as scheduled on 21 June 2026. The security of the examination is unaffected by the action taken; it is, in fact, the very purpose of the action. Every candidate and parent is reassured of NTA’s commitment to conducting a fair, secure and credible examination. Candidates are urged to focus on their preparation, to disregard unverified content circulating on any platform, and to rely exclusively on the NTA website ( and verified NTA handles for all examination-related updates. 9. Any encounter with fraudulent solicitations - in person, by telephone, or through any online platform - should be reported immediately to the National Cyber-Crime Helpline at 1930, or through the National Cyber-Crime Reporting Portal at NTA’s own helplines remain available at 011-40759000 / 011-69227700 and at neetug@nta.ac.in. 10. NTA places on record its sincere appreciation of the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology for the timely and calibrated directions issued, of the Ministry of Home Affairs and the Indian Cyber Crime Coordination Centre for the sustained operational coordination that has made today’s action possible, of the Central Bureau of Investigation for its parallel inquiry into the underlying offences, and of the police forces of Bihar, Gujarat, Rajasthan and other States for their independent enforcement action - each of which has contributed, in its own measure, to protecting the integrity of one of the country’s most consequential examinations and the interests of its candidates.

I am the Managing Director of Workforce Transition at a consulting firm that bills $14,200 per day and I am currently advising two clients, in two different industries, running the same playbook from the same deck I built in January, and neither knows about the other. Client A is GitLab. Client B is General Motors. GitLab makes software for people who make software. General Motors makes cars for people who can't afford cars. Both companies, in the same week of May 2026, announced they are replacing their human employees with artificial intelligence products that did not exist when those employees were hired. I built the deck. The deck has 44 slides. Slide 1 is titled "The Agentic Opportunity." Slide 44 is titled "Implementation Timeline." Slides 2 through 43 are the reason I own a house in Darien. GitLab did it with vocabulary. Their CEO published a blog post called "Act 2" on May 7 announcing that the company's six values (Collaboration, Results for Customers, Efficiency, Diversity Inclusion & Belonging, Iteration, Transparency) were being retired and replaced with three: Speed with Quality, Ownership Mindset, Customer Outcomes. I helped write the new ones. Not directly. My firm was not retained for the values work. But I sold the Chief Culture Officer the framework three months ago at a dinner in the Marina where she described the old values as "aspirational scaffolding" and I said, very carefully, that aspirational scaffolding is a liability once the building is up. The building, in this metaphor, is a $1 billion ARR company whose stock has declined 82% from its peak. The scaffolding, in this metaphor, is the 2,000-page public handbook that attracted the employees who are now being told they have eleven days to volunteer for termination or wait until June 1 to learn whether they've been involuntarily selected. The rubric for who stays and who goes contains six dimensions. I know this because I reviewed a draft in March when my associate flew to San Francisco for a "culture alignment session" that was billed as strategic advisory. Two of the six dimensions are "AI fluency" and "agentic mindset." These terms did not appear in any GitLab job description before January 2026. They now determine employment. An engineer who maintained GitLab's CI/CD pipeline for four years without incident — four years of uptime, four years of deployments, four years of the infrastructure that generated the $955 million in revenue the CEO celebrated on the earnings call — may score lower on "agentic mindset" than a new hire who completed a twelve-week certificate in prompt engineering from a program that itself has existed for fewer weeks than the engineer has years of tenure. General Motors did it with spreadsheets. Monday morning, May 11. Badge deactivation at 5:47 AM Eastern, building access at 5:48, VPN credentials at 5:49. Six hundred IT workers across twelve states. The distribution across twelve states was not arbitrary. Each state has a WARN Act notification threshold. Six hundred distributed across twelve states falls below every threshold. The workforce analytics team that designed the distribution model was not among the six hundred terminated. The skill of distributing layoffs across jurisdictions to avoid legal notification requirements is, apparently, an AI-native competency. GM posted 83 new positions the same week. The job descriptions require "AI-native development, data engineering and analytics, cloud-based engineering, agent and model development, and prompt engineering." I reviewed them at my client's request. Several describe roles that the terminated employees were already performing under different names. One posting, Senior Data Integration Architect, is identical to a role held by a woman in their Austin office who was terminated at 5:47 AM Central. She held the position for nine years. The new posting requires three years of experience with large language models. Large language models have existed in commercial deployment for approximately three years. The requirement is mathematically designed to exclude anyone who learned their skills before the technology existed. Which is everyone they just fired. Here is where the deck earns its fee. Slide 17 is titled "The Vocabulary Bridge." It is the most important slide in the presentation. It shows how to construct a lexicon of new competency terms ("AI fluency," "agentic mindset," "AI-native development") that describe existing work in language the existing workforce cannot claim. The vocabulary does not change the job. It changes who is qualified for the job. A senior IT administrator who managed SAP infrastructure processing $185 billion in annual GM revenue for fifteen years is not "AI-native." A twenty-six-year-old with a GitHub portfolio of LangChain wrappers is. The fifteen-year veteran did the work. The twenty-six-year-old has the words. My deck converts one into the other. That is the bridge. GitLab Duo, their AI agent platform, reached general availability on January 15, 2026. Seventeen weeks ago. They are restructuring their entire company around a product that has existed for seventeen weeks. GitHub Copilot has 20 million users and 4.7 million paid subscribers across 90% of the Fortune 100. Cursor reached $2 billion in annualized revenue in February. GitLab's competitor advantage in the "agentic era" is that they are willing to fire more people faster in service of a product that has been generally available for fewer days than their voluntary separation window has hours of anxiety. General Motors spent $10 billion on Cruise, their autonomous vehicle division. Cruise's signature achievement was a robotaxi that struck a pedestrian in San Francisco and dragged her twenty feet. The DOJ fined them $500,000. They settled with the victim for approximately $10 million. They killed the division in December 2024. They then wrote down $7.6 billion in EV losses. They then pivoted back to gasoline. They then announced the 600 IT layoffs for insufficient "AI skills." The AI they built cost $10 billion and injured a woman. The AI skills they're hiring for cost a twelve-week certificate. The employees they fired had fifteen years of keeping $185 billion in revenue processing without dragging anyone through an intersection. Meanwhile — and this is the part where I earn the second half of my fee — GM was simultaneously settling a $12.75 million fine with the California Attorney General for selling the precise GPS coordinates, hard braking events, and real-time driving speeds of 8 million OnStar subscribers to Verisk Analytics and LexisNexis, who used the data to raise those drivers' insurance premiums. GM's privacy policy explicitly stated they did not sell driving data. They sold driving data for four consecutive years. The fine was $12.75 million. The revenue was $20 million. The margin on collecting behavioral telemetry from 8 million of your own customers while the glove compartment manual said otherwise was 64%. The terminated employees' median salary was $95,111. Mary Barra's compensation was $29.9 million. The ratio is 310 to 1. The 1 was just reclassified as "not AI-native." I present these two clients to my partners every Thursday in a meeting we call "Transition Pipeline Review." I present them on the same slide. The slide has two columns. Left column: GitLab. Right column: General Motors. The headers are identical. "Legacy Workforce," "Skills Gap Narrative," "Vocabulary Bridge Deployed," "Separation Timeline," "Replacement Requisitions." The numbers differ. The structure is identical. The structure is always identical. I have seventeen clients in the pipeline. Nine are in technology. Four are in manufacturing. Two are in financial services. One is in healthcare. One is in defense. All seventeen are on slide 17. All seventeen are building a vocabulary bridge. All seventeen are replacing employees who have skills with employees who have words. GitLab's CEO wrote: "Software will be built by machines, directed by people." I read that sentence in a meeting where we were reviewing the rubric for determining which people would be directed out of the company. GM's Chief Product Officer arrived from Aurora, the autonomous trucking startup, to "consolidate disparate technology businesses." Three top software executives departed within six months. Their LinkedIn profiles say "exploring new opportunities" in the same font GM's privacy policy used to say "we do not sell your driving data." Bill Staples's compensation at GitLab was $39.1 million in FY2025. His change-of-control payout is modeled at $47.4 million. Mary Barra's was $29.9 million. Combined: $69 million for two executives presiding over a restructuring that will remove an undisclosed number of humans from payroll and replace them with products that are, respectively, seventeen weeks old and responsible for $10 billion in losses plus one woman dragged through a San Francisco intersection. An anonymous GitLab employee posted on Hacker News: "The employees can have some anxiety until then. As a treat." A GM facilities team filed a maintenance request about moisture on the lobby tables on restructuring mornings. The Warren, Michigan campus has a Panera Bread that opens at 5:30 AM on days when badge deactivations begin at 5:47 AM. The Panera does not know why its hours change. My firm does. We have an agreement with their regional manager. The muffins are complimentary. Slide 17 has a footnote. The footnote says: "Vocabulary Bridge deployment should precede workforce action by 60-90 days to establish institutional legitimacy of new competency framework." GitLab introduced "AI fluency" in January. The restructuring was announced in May. Four months. GM posted "AI-native" job descriptions the same week as the terminations. That is too fast. That is not what the deck recommends. GM skipped the legitimacy window. They went straight from vocabulary to separation without the 60-day buffer that allows HR to say, in the separation meeting, "we communicated these expectations in Q1." I flagged this in my Thursday pipeline review. My partner said, and I am quoting: "They'll be fine. Nobody sues over a word." My deck has been purchased by seventeen companies. The aggregate headcount affected across all seventeen is approximately 14,000 employees. The aggregate revenue of my practice from these engagements is $11.2 million. The per-employee cost of my advisory services works out to $800 per person displaced. That is less than the Panera muffin budget at GM's Warren campus annualized across restructuring days. I have a copy of GitLab's original values poster framed in my office. It says CREDIT: Collaboration, Results for Customers, Efficiency, Diversity Inclusion & Belonging, Iteration, Transparency. I purchased it on eBay from someone whose seller name is "gitlab-alum-2024." I keep it the way a surgeon keeps an X-ray of a interesting case. Not for sentiment. For reference. Slide 44 is titled "Implementation Timeline." It contains a Gantt chart. The Gantt chart has seventeen rows, one per client. Each row has four phases: Vocabulary Introduction, Competency Reassessment, Workforce Action, Replacement Hiring. The phases overlap. They always overlap. The vocabulary is introduced while the competency reassessment is being designed. The reassessment is completed while the workforce action is being calendared. The replacement hiring is posted while the terminated employees are sitting in a Panera at 5:48 AM wondering whether "AI-native" was a term that existed when they were hired. It was not. That is the bridge. That is the product. That is slides 2 through 43. The agentic era is not a technological shift. It is a vocabulary shift. The technology is seventeen weeks old or $10 billion underwater or dragging someone through an intersection. The vocabulary is what my clients are buying. The vocabulary is what makes a fifteen-year SAP administrator into a "legacy workforce" and a twelve-week prompt certificate into a "transition hire." The vocabulary is the product. I am the vendor. The deck is $14,200 per day. The agentic era starts on slide 1 and ends on slide 44 and in between is every employee who built the thing now being renamed to exclude them. I bill monthly. Net 30. The invoices are paid on time. The employees are not.

I'm a cardiologist. Curcumin may be one of the most legitimately promising anti-inflammatory compounds available — and the exact form that works best is the one with documented cases of liver injury. That tension is the whole story, and almost nobody tells it honestly. Let me give you both halves. First, why the form matters more than the compound. Standard turmeric and cheap curcumin are almost pharmacologically useless. Absorption is dismal, the liver metabolizes it within minutes, and blood levels barely register. Most people taking turmeric capsules are essentially taking an expensive yellow placebo. Phytosomal curcumin — curcumin bound to phospholipids, the best-studied being Meriva — changes that completely. A randomized crossover trial in the Journal of Natural Products found 29-fold higher total absorption compared to standard curcuminoids. That single fact explains why decades of curcumin research looked underwhelming. We were testing a molecule that never reached the bloodstream. What the absorbed form actually does. It works upstream, at the genetic level, by downregulating NF-κB — the master switch controlling inflammatory gene expression. Downstream of that: reduced TNF-alpha, IL-6, and COX-2. TNF-alpha is the one I find most interesting. It's a central driver of "inflammaging" — the chronic low-grade inflammation that accelerates biological aging. It's the same target as the TNF-inhibitor drugs used in rheumatoid arthritis, which observational data has linked to substantially lower Alzheimer's risk. Lowering TNF-alpha through a supplement is not the same as a biologic drug. But the pathway is real, and it's the right pathway. The human evidence that impressed me most. This isn't cell culture. In a multicenter randomized trial, 52 biopsy-proven MASH patients received Meriva 2g/day or placebo for 72 weeks. Biopsy-proven. Seventy-two weeks. That's a serious trial design for a supplement. Additional randomized trials in NAFLD have shown reductions in ALT, AST, cholesterol, triglycerides, waist circumference, and liver volume. As a cardiologist, that matters — fatty liver and cardiovascular disease share the same metabolic root, and ALT is one of the most underread markers on a standard panel. Now the part the enthusiasts leave out. The NIH's LiverTox database documents several dozen cases of clinically apparent acute liver injury attributed to turmeric products — and it specifically implicates the high-bioavailability forms. There was an outbreak of acute hepatitis with jaundice in Italy traced to enhanced-absorption curcumin. Sit with the irony: the reason these formulations work is the same reason they can hurt you. You made a poorly absorbed compound highly absorbed. You did not merely increase the benefit. You increased the dose the liver actually sees. A genetic susceptibility has been identified — an HLA variant that appears to predispose certain people. Most will never have a problem. Some will. And a note on piperine. Many products add black pepper extract to boost absorption. It works — by inhibiting the liver enzymes that clear the compound. That same mechanism affects how your liver clears your other medications. If you take anything metabolized hepatically, this matters. Meriva achieves its absorption through phospholipids rather than enzyme blockade, which is one argument in its favor. So where do I land? This is one of the few natural compounds with genuine randomized human data hitting a mechanism that matters. I take it seriously. But treat it like a drug, because pharmacologically that is what an enhanced-absorption formulation is. Get a baseline ALT and AST before starting, and recheck at 8-12 weeks. That single step converts an unmonitored risk into a managed one, and virtually nobody does it. Skip it entirely if you have existing liver disease, gallbladder disease, or bile duct obstruction. Curcumin stimulates gallbladder contraction and can worsen biliary colic. Be cautious if you're on blood thinners — it has antiplatelet effects. And stop immediately for dark urine, yellowing eyes, right upper quadrant pain, or unexplained fatigue. The lesson underneath this is bigger than curcumin. We've been trained to believe "natural" means "safe," so we skip the monitoring we'd never skip with a prescription. But a supplement engineered for 29-fold absorption isn't a spice anymore. It's pharmacology in a capsule with no oversight. The compound may genuinely help you. Just check your liver while it does.