UMEED Portal: SC Declines to Entertain Plea on ‘Glitches’, Asks Waqf Muttawalli to Approach Authorities

The bench of Chief Justice of India Surya Kant and Justice Joymalya Bagchi held that no case was made out for invoking Article 32 of the Constitution.

“We see no ground to entertain this writ petition. The petitioner may be well advised to approach the prescribed authority for clarification or addressing of grievances, for which liberty is granted,” the Bench observed.

At the outset, the Bench questioned Senior Advocate Dr Menaka Guruswamy, appearing for the petitioner, on why the grievance could not be raised before the jurisdictional High Court. “Why cannot you go to the High Court?” the CJI asked. Guruswamy responded that High Courts were unlikely to entertain the issue as challenges to the 2025 amendments to the Waqf law were already pending before the Supreme Court.

Rejecting the submission, the CJI clarified that the present petition raised issues of “administrative difficulties” concerning the functioning of the portal, not a substantive constitutional challenge to the amendments, and such issues could be examined by the High Court.

Guruswamy further argued that apart from technical glitches, the petitioner was also aggrieved by the classification under the Waqf Rules, where “Waqf by survey” had been subsumed under the category of “Waqf by user”. She pointed out that the UMEED portal’s drop-down menu did not provide any separate option for “Waqf by survey”.

Justice Bagchi noted that the Ministry had already clarified that “Waqf by survey” stood subsumed under “Waqf by user”. When Guruswamy insisted that this itself was the issue, Justice Bagchi responded that such a contention amounted to a challenge to the legality of classification, not a case of a portal glitch. “It is not a difficult situation for your client to upload details under the Waqf by user category. You can always do it by raising an objection that it is not a Waqf by user,” the judge observed.

The Bench further noted that the petitioner had, in fact, uploaded details under the “Waqf by user” category, undermining the claim that the portal was dysfunctional. Justice Bagchi added that the question of classification could be examined in other writ petitions already pending before the Supreme Court.

Addressing concerns about potential consequences of uploading under the “Waqf by user” category, Justice Bagchi pointed out that the Waqf in question was already a registered Waqf. “There is no dilution of rights by putting your case under Waqf by user. You are a registered Waqf,” he said.

When Guruswamy contended that the 2025 amendment required all Waqfs to re-register, Justice Bagchi disagreed, clarifying that registration was a pre-existing statutory requirement and the amendment only mandated uploading of data on the portal. “Registration and uploading are different. Uploading is just a data entry,” he said.

The writ petition was filed by a Mutawalli from Madhya Pradesh challenging the enforceability of the digital uploading mandate under Section 3B of the Unified Waqf Management, Empowerment, Efficiency and Development Act, 1995. The petitioner alleged that the UMEED portal notified under the UMEED Rules, 2025 was structurally defective, technologically unfit, and incompatible with the statutory framework governing waqfs in several States.

It was argued that the problem was particularly acute in Madhya Pradesh, where most Waqfs are survey and Gazette-notified properties under Sections 4 and 5 of the Waqf Act, and “Waqf by user” rarely exists. The petitioner claimed that forcing uploads under an incorrect category would amount to an unlawful declaration and breach the fiduciary duties of a Mutawalli.

The petition filed through AoR Vaibhav Choudhary states that such forced misclassification violates both statutory duties and fiduciary obligations of a Mutawalli. It sought declarations that the portal was non-functional and incapable of registering survey and Gazette-notified Waqfs, directions to rectify the alleged defects or create a separate upload mechanism for such Waqfs, and protection from any coercive or penal action for non-compliance.