AhlulBayt News Agency (ABNA): When the Waqf (Amendment) Act, 2025, was pushed through Parliament, the government's central justification was data. Waqf land in India, the argument went, was poorly documented, easy to misuse, and in need of a transparent, centralised registry.
More than a year later, that registry exists. It is called UMEED. And by the government's own numbers, it still can't tell you what it's supposed to be regulating.
The portal was launched on June 6, 2025, with a six-month deadline for every mutawalli in the country to upload records of their waqf properties. When that deadline lapsed in December, only 27 percent of India's roughly 8.7 lakh waqf properties had been registered.
The government quietly extended the window rather than admit that the exercise had failed on its own terms. Six months after that, in June 2026, a progress report showed the number had climbed to about 62 percent, or roughly 5.4 lakh properties.
That sounds like progress until you look at the other half of the number: more than a lakh waqf properties still have no record on the portal at all. Not pending, not rejected. Simply absent, as if they don't exist.
The state-by-state picture is where the failure gets specific. Karnataka registered 81 percent of its properties, Punjab 90 percent, and Jammu and Kashmir 77 percent. West Bengal, which holds the second-largest waqf portfolio in the country after Uttar Pradesh, managed under one percent. Uttar Pradesh itself, home to the largest number of waqf properties of any state, registered only around 11 percent of Sunni Waqf Board holdings and 5 percent of Shia Waqf Board holdings. These aren't small gaps. They're entire regions of the country where the law's core mechanism simply never took hold.
The All India Muslim Personal Law Board sought an urgent meeting with the Ministry of Minority Affairs over repeated portal crashes and slow processing. Boards and mutawallis elsewhere reported the same problem, on top of the plainer difficulty of producing paperwork for a mosque or graveyard that has existed for two or three centuries without ever needing a deed.
This isn't a side issue in the constitutional challenge working its way through the Supreme Court. It's close to the whole point of it. When the Court delivered its interim order in September 2025, it declined to stay the Act in its entirety but blocked a handful of specific provisions, including the requirement that a person prove five years of practising Islam before dedicating property as waqf, and parts of the process that let a government-appointed officer decide unilaterally whether disputed land was waqf or government property.
What the Court did not resolve, because it couldn't, was what happens to the roughly four lakh 'waqf by user' properties—land recognised as waqf through long, uncontested religious use rather than a formal deed—that the amended Act now derecognises unless registered. If the registry can't even keep pace with properties that do have paperwork, the properties that never had any are in obvious trouble.
The litigation has since scattered into the High Courts, which is usually a sign that a Supreme Court interim order has settled less than it appeared to. In Kerala, the High Court restrained the State Waqf Board from taking any major decisions until a separate challenge to the board's composition is resolved, a ruling the Board has now asked the Supreme Court to set aside.
That's a state-level dispute over board composition, sitting on top of a national dispute over the Act's constitutionality, sitting on top of a registration exercise that is, by the government's own account, still well over a third short of complete.
Nearly a year after the interim order, the case is still being argued on the merits before the Court, with hearings continuing through the summer of 2026 and no final judgment in sight.
None of this argues that waqf administration in India was working well before 2025. Real evidence of mismanagement and disputed land claims predates this Act by decades, and reform of some kind was overdue. But a law justified by the need for reliable data about waqf property cannot be judged a success while its own flagship data-collection tool is missing records for over a lakh properties and has barely registered anything in some of the states with the largest waqf holdings in the country. The government built the instrument it said the problem required, and the instrument is still failing at the one job it had.
For the communities whose mosques, graveyards, dargahs, and madrasas depend on this process, none of that is abstract. It's the difference between land with a secure legal status and land sitting in limbo—unregistered, undocumented, and now potentially unrecognised—for as long as it takes the courts to finish arguing about a law whose own paperwork still isn't in order.
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