Over 350,000 Waqf properties missing from India’s new database

NEW DELHI, India (MNTV) — More than 350,000 Waqf properties have disappeared from India’s newly introduced national endowment database, triggering alarm among Waqf boards, legal experts and community leaders who warn that the country’s move to a centralized digital system may have erased one of the largest Islamic endowment networks in the world from the official record.

Waqf assets — religious endowments that fund mosques, shrines, graveyards, schools, hospitals and welfare institutions — form a vast system of community-owned land with centuries of historical documentation. 

The Indian government previously told Parliament that the country held 872,352 immovable Waqf properties and 16,713 movable assets, based on the older Waqf Management System of India (WAMSI). 

But when the registration window for the new UMEED portal closed on December 6, 2025, authorities announced that only 517,040 entries had been uploaded nationwide. Even if every pending application is eventually approved, 355,312 properties remain unaccounted for.

The shortfall is most striking in states that historically held some of the country’s largest endowment portfolios. Uttar Pradesh’s Sunni Waqf Board shows one of the deepest collapses, dropping from more than 217,000 recorded properties to just above 86,000 on the new portal. Tamil Nadu’s listings fall from roughly 66,000 to about 8,000. West Bengal drops from more than 80,000 to 23,000. Punjab declines from nearly 76,000 to around 26,000.

Smaller states and union territories show proportionally severe contractions. Himachal Pradesh shrinks from more than 5,300 listed properties to under 900, while Dadra and Nagar Haveli records only two entries — down from 30. 

Indian-administered Jammu and Kashmir, long regarded as a region with extensive and historically significant Waqf holdings, lists about 25,000 properties this year compared to more than 32,000 last year, leaving more than 7,000 missing.

A few states show the opposite trend. Maharashtra’s listing jumps from 36,701 to 62,939 properties. Both Sunni and Shia boards in Bihar report substantial increases. Delhi and the Andaman and Nicobar Islands also register growth. 

The unevenness has fuelled speculation that states employed widely differing verification processes, documentation standards and migration protocols when shifting from WAMSI to UMEED.

Officials from the Ministry of Minority Affairs argue that the older WAMSI database contained extensive errors, including duplicate entries, mismatched land codes, zero-area plots and unverified records. 

They maintain that UMEED enforces stricter requirements, including updated geographic coordinates and current revenue documentation — standards that many older records may not meet.

But Waqf boards and legal experts say the abrupt disappearance of such large volumes of properties could have far-reaching consequences.

 Missing records make endowment land vulnerable to encroachment, complicate court cases, stall redevelopment projects and undermine the financial sustainability of institutions that rely on Waqf income. Some boards contend that valid properties were rejected simply because archival records were incomplete or predated modern digital formats.

A Waqf mutawalli (caretaker) from Madhya Pradesh has already petitioned India’s Supreme Court, alleging structural flaws in the new system and warning that the database transition risks permanently altering the legal status of thousands of endowments.

For a community whose religious and social institutions often depend on Waqf land, the disappearance of more than a third of previously recorded properties has raised fears that digitisation — instead of improving transparency — may have produced one of the largest data losses in the history of India’s endowment governance.