Supreme Court to Hear Pleas on Extending Deadline for Waqf Property Registration
Asaduddin Owaisi and others seek more time to register waqf properties on the Centre’s UMEED portal.
The Supreme Court will hear on October 28 a set of petitions requesting an extension of the deadline for registering waqf properties on the central government’s UMEED portal. One of the key petitions has been filed by AIMIM chief Asaduddin Owaisi.
During a hearing on the matter, senior advocate Nizam Pasha, representing the petitioners, urged the court to schedule the case quickly, pointing out that most of the six-month registration window had already passed. The registration period began after amendments to the Waqf Act came into effect earlier this year.
A bench led by Chief Justice B.R. Gavai and Justice K. Vinod Chandran agreed to hear Owaisi’s plea along with another similar case that had been mentioned earlier.
The petitions challenge the short time frame given for mandatory registration of all waqf properties, including those recognized through continued use, known as waqf-by-user. These are properties that may not have official documentation but have long been used for religious or charitable purposes.
On September 15, the Supreme Court had temporarily paused certain parts of the amended Waqf Act, 2025. This included a clause that said only Muslims who had practiced Islam for at least five years could create waqf properties. However, the court did not halt the entire law, stating that all laws are presumed to be constitutional unless proven otherwise.
The court also noted that the government’s decision to remove the waqf-by-user category from the law did not appear arbitrary at first glance. Petitioners had expressed concern that this change could allow the government to take over such properties, but the bench did not find enough grounds to support that claim for now.
The UMEED portal—short for Unified Waqf Management, Empowerment, Efficiency and Development—was launched on June 6, 2025. It requires all waqf properties to be registered and geo-tagged digitally within six months. However, the petitioners argue that ongoing legal proceedings have left very little time to complete this process.
The matter will now be reviewed in detail by the Supreme Court later this month.
