Waqf Registration Ends With Fears of Vanishing Properties

The crisis is unfolding around Waqf data in India that begins with a single, unsettling contradiction and fear of vanishing properties.

On December 9, 2024, Union Minister for Minority Affairs, Kiren Rijiju, told the Rajya Sabha that India had 872,352 immovable and 16,713 movable Waqf properties recorded under the Waqf Act.

But a year later, as the registration deadline on the UMEED portal ended on December 6, 2025, the government press release says that only 517,040 properties were uploaded, 216,905 were approved, 213,941 remained under review, and 10,869 were rejected, including a large portion that the government classified as invalid entries.

Even if every pending record is eventually approved, the final total will still fall dramatically short of the earlier official number. The mismatch is so enormous that questions of accuracy, transparency, and purpose are now unavoidable. If nearly four lakh properties have not been uploaded on UMEED, where have they gone?

Rijiju’s figures that he presented last year were drawn from the government’s own Waqf Management System of India (WAMSI). Yet exactly one year later, when the government closed its newly launched UMEED portal, it announced that only 517,040 Waqf properties had been uploaded.

The gulf between what existed in official records and what now appears in the new digital roll is staggering than 3.6 lakh immovable Waqf properties are simply missing when the two datasets are compared.

Experts say this discrepancy is not an abstract numerical anomaly; it goes to the heart of legal recognition, administrative continuity, and the future security of Waqf lands across the country.

If older records confirmed the existence of nearly nine lakh Waqf properties, how can the new portal reflect just a little over five lakh? And what happens to the remaining properties that do not appear in UMEED? Are they still Waqf in the eyes of the law? Or does their absence in this new digital regime mean their status will quietly fade away?

The fears deepen further when one looks at what the government said about UMEED’s six-month upload window.

This anxiety grows when the earlier state-wise WAMSI figures are placed side by side with the new UMEED numbers. Across several large states, the new portal reflects only a small fraction of the properties previously recorded.

Uttar Pradesh, for example, had 217,161 digitised properties on WAMSI, but only 86,345 appear on UMEED. In West Bengal, where earlier records listed 80,480 Waqf properties, the new system shows only 23,086 uploads.

Tamil Nadu’s older figure of 66,092 has shrunk to 8,252. Punjab was recorded earlier as having 75,965 properties, but contributed only 25,910 to the new portal. These are not minor reductions; they are massive disappearances from the official ledger.

The natural assumption would be that the new system failed to receive all the data. That is partly true. Mutawalli across the country struggled with a poorly functioning platform, frequent crashes, and repeated failures in document submission. But the concern is larger than failed uploads.

When the earlier record showed lakhs of properties and the new platform shows so many fewer, the question arises whether the government intends to treat the unuploaded ones as legally valid Waqf or simply exclude them from future recognition. Until this question is answered through a clear official clarification, anxiety will continue to escalate across Waqf Boards, local Mutawalli, and the wider Muslim community.

On the other end of the spectrum, some states have reported unexpectedly higher numbers on UMEED than they ever had on WAMSI. Maharashtra, which earlier had 36,701 properties, now shows 62,939 uploaded. Bihar’s Sunni Waqf Board, which previously recorded 6,867 properties, has 9,984 on UMEED.

The Bihar Shia Board has jumped from 1,750 earlier to 5,220 uploaded, with 4,802 already approved. Delhi, which earlier showed just 1,047 properties, now displays 3,152 upload entries. These unexpected expansions raise their own unsettling questions. If properties appear on UMEED in numbers far exceeding earlier government datasets, does that mean the earlier records were wrong or that the new uploads include questionable entries? And if the government has already rejected 10,869 properties, including 3,633 Waqf-related entries, how will it verify authenticity in states showing such dramatic increases?

The roots of this crisis lie in a much older story: the government’s inability to complete the WAMSI project. Initiated after the Joint Parliamentary Committee on Waqf submitted its ninth report in 2008, WAMSI was envisioned as a modern, end-to-end management system for Waqf properties.

It was supposed to digitise the state Waqf Board records, map properties with GPS, include photographs, record ownership details, and provide complete lifecycle tracking of every Waqf asset. The project, estimated at ₹25 crore, was approved but never fully implemented. Sixteen years later, WAMSI remains incomplete, under-digitised, and unreliable. Many records lack geo-tagging, many entries contain errors, and the platform itself has recently been inaccessible for days.

Instead of strengthening WAMSI and completing its digitisation, the government abruptly shifted the burden to thousands of local Mutawallis for whom digital literacy, computer access, and document scanning are major obstacles. Mutawalli, many elderly, many based in rural locations, many without internet access, were given six months to upload decades of records. In numerous cases, documents existed only in fragile physical form; legal notifications were missing; land maps were unavailable; or property boundaries were unclear. In effect, a 16-year government failure to digitise Waqf records was pushed onto the weakest and least equipped stakeholders in the system.

Difficulties In Registration

The government maintains that it offered extensive training and technical support, citing a master-trainer workshop in Delhi, deployment of senior technical teams, constituency-level meetings, and a helpline.

But across the country, Mutawallis describe a very different experience: a portal that frequently crashed, a help desk few could reach, and no real assistance when urgent troubleshooting was needed. While officials have claimed a “surge in uploads in the final hours,” those who struggled through the process say the surge reflects desperation rather than efficient digital outreach.

The consequence is now visible in the widening gap between old and new data. Properties that existed in earlier official records have disappeared from the new ones, and new entries have appeared in unexpected places. This gulf will inevitably spill into the legal system. Waqf tribunals already handle more than 40,000 pending cases.

The Supreme Court has said that Mutawalli seeking extensions should approach their tribunals, and the government has announced a three-month grace period. But if even a small fraction of the missing properties now require tribunal intervention, India’s judicial system may face an unprecedented flood of Waqf-related litigation.

There is also the deeper legal problem of recognition. If a property historically treated as Waqf does not appear on UMEED, will it still be governed by the long-standing principle that “once a waqf, always a waqf”? Or will its absence from the new digital register create vulnerabilities in future disputes? No government clarification has so far addressed this question, and without it, uncertainty will spread into every part of Waqf administration, mosques and graveyards, to schools, dargahs, waqf-funded hostels and community centres.

At the same time, the mismatch between datasets risks fuelling communal suspicion. In recent years, Hindutva groups have popularised the allegation of “land jihad,” accusing Muslims of using Waqf laws to expand land control. If thousands of Waqf properties suddenly vanish from official records or appear in inflated numbers in certain areas, the confusion may be misinterpreted or deliberately weaponised, contributing to mistrust and hostility.

There are internal questions too. Many in the community ask why Waqf Boards and Muslim representative bodies, such as the All India Muslim Personal Law Board, did not warn Mutawalli early about the seriousness of the registration deadline. Some initially believed that courts would intervene and that the upload window might be extended. Yet even this internal lapse cannot overshadow the larger structural issue: the government’s own earlier data said India had more than eight lakh immovable Waqf properties, and now its new portal accounts for barely five lakh.

Until this contradiction is resolved, one fear will remain at the centre of this unfolding crisis. If a Waqf property existed in older government records but does not appear in the new UMEED portal, what will become of it in the eyes of the law? Will it remain protected as a Waqf, or will silence and administrative ambiguity slowly erode its status?

Until the government reconciles the old and new datasets and issues a clear public statement about the legal standing of unuploaded properties, millions of Indian Muslims will continue to worry that a digital reform presented as transparency may instead be sweeping centuries-old Waqf assets into an uncertain future.

Afroz Alam Sahil is a journalist and author. He can be contacted at @afrozsahil on X.