Waqf in India Why the Trust for the Poor Is Failing Its Own People
- BerryBeat Team
- 1 minute ago
- 10 min read
A waqf is meant to be an act of faith that outlives the donor. A person gives land, a shop, a house, or another asset, and the gift is locked into public service. The poor are fed. Orphans are educated. Widows receive support. The sick find care. A mosque, school, hospital, graveyard, or shelter keeps running because someone decided that private property should become a permanent public good.
That is the moral idea.
The Indian reality is far more troubling. Waqf in India sits on a vast base of land and property, yet its poorest intended beneficiaries often see little of it. Properties are encroached. Rents are low or unpaid. Records are weak. Tribunals are clogged. Local elites capture benefits. State intervention comes wrapped in reformist language, but also raises fears of political control.
The result is a painful contradiction. A system created to protect the vulnerable now often fails them first.
Waqf was designed as a permanent trust, not a private estate
The word `waqf` means to pause, to hold, to endow. In Islamic law and practice, it refers to property dedicated permanently for religious or charitable purposes. Once a property becomes waqf, it is not meant to be sold off for personal gain or treated as an inheritance. It is held in trust.
That permanence matters. A donor may die, but the social purpose continues.
In India, waqf properties include:
Mosques and dargahs
Graveyards and burial grounds
Madrasas and schools
Shops, houses, and commercial buildings
Agricultural land
Hospitals, orphanages, and community facilities
The purpose is not abstract spirituality alone. It is material welfare. Food, education, health, burial, shelter, and dignity are central to the idea.
That is why the current crisis cannot be reduced to a dispute between the State and Muslim institutions. It is also about whether poor Muslims, especially the most marginalised, receive what was promised in their name.
India’s waqf system reportedly controls around 8.7 lakh properties across 9.4 lakh acres, valued at about Rs 1.2 lakh crore. That makes it one of the country’s largest landholders, after the Railways and the Armed Forces.
This scale should have made waqf a major pillar of Muslim social welfare. Instead, the gap between what the system owns and what it delivers has become one of the clearest signs of institutional failure.
The numbers show a system that owns much and earns little
The Sachar Committee, which examined the social, economic, and educational condition of Muslims in India, estimated in 2006 that waqf properties could generate about Rs 12,000 crore annually if managed properly.
The actual income at the time was only Rs 163 crore.
That was less than 1.5% of the estimated potential.
This single comparison explains why the waqf question is not just about land records or religious administration. It is about lost schools, unpaid scholarships, underfunded clinics, neglected graveyards, and welfare schemes that never reach the people for whom the endowment exists.
Later data deepens the concern. Business Standard data from December 2025 showed that net income from waqf properties fell by 99% between 2019-20 and 2023-24. In the same period, registered properties increased.
That means the system had more known assets on paper, while income nearly vanished.
For people tracking Waqf Board India land mismanagement, the pattern is hard to ignore. The core problem is not only that land has been lost. It is also that land still recognised as waqf often fails to produce fair, transparent, and accountable public benefit.
A property can fail its purpose in many ways.
It may be occupied illegally. It may be leased at rents far below market value. It may sit unused because records are disputed. It may be controlled by local patrons who treat it as influence. It may produce income that never becomes visible in budgets. It may be trapped in litigation for years.
Each failure has a human cost. A child who could have received a scholarship drops out. A widow who could have received support goes unseen. A family denied burial space faces humiliation at the worst moment of grief.
The tragedy is not only financial leakage. It is moral leakage.
Encroachment is not a small leak. It is a structural collapse
In November 2024, Parliament was told that 59,000 waqf properties are under illegal encroachment. That number should have produced a national governance debate, not only a communal shouting match.
Encroachment often sounds like a vague word. In practice, it can mean a shopkeeper refusing to vacate, a local strongman taking over land, a private party building on waqf property, a public authority using land without proper settlement, or an influential person ensuring no one enforces the record.
The Punjab example is especially stark. A member of the state waqf board reportedly told The Tribune that 70% of properties are encroached, predominantly by politicians, police officers, and civil administrators.
If that account reflects the ground reality even partly, it points to a difficult truth. Waqf failure cannot be blamed only on poor internal management. The beneficiaries are also losing land to people with power outside the community.
This is where accountability must be honest.
Some encroachment survives because waqf institutions are weak. Some survives because their officials are compromised. Some survives because litigation takes too long. Some survives because the encroacher is socially or politically too powerful to challenge.
The system fails at several levels at once:
Poor land records make claims harder to defend.
Local boards often lack capacity for serious property management.
Legal disputes drag on for years.
Political pressure can protect encroachers.
Beneficiaries rarely have easy access to income and lease data.
Community oversight is weak or symbolic.
The tribunals show the scale of the breakdown. Of 40,951 cases pending in Waqf Tribunals, 9,942 were filed by Muslims against institutions managing waqf.
That detail matters. It complicates the lazy claim that every criticism of waqf management is an attack from outside. Many grievances come from within the community. People are not only defending waqf against the State or outsiders. They are also fighting waqf institutions themselves.
A trust system should not be so opaque that its own beneficiaries must litigate to be heard.
The question is not whether waqf needs reform. It clearly does. The question is who controls the reform, who benefits from it, and whether the poor remain central.
Pasmanda exclusion exposes the deepest betrayal
The harshest test of any welfare institution is not how it treats its most powerful stakeholders. It is how it treats the people with the least power.
By that measure, parts of the waqf system have failed badly.
In some areas, Pasmanda Muslims, among the most marginalised within India’s Muslim communities, have reportedly been denied burial rights in waqf board-controlled cemeteries. This is not a minor administrative quarrel. Burial is tied to dignity, belonging, and religious community. Denying burial space to marginalised Muslims turns a charitable trust into an instrument of social exclusion.
The contradiction is unbearable. Land endowed to serve the poor excludes the poorest.
Pasmanda Muslim concerns often reveal what polite elite conversations hide. Muslim institutions are not automatically egalitarian because they are minority institutions. They can reproduce caste-like exclusion, ashraf dominance, local patronage, gendered neglect, and class control.
A waqf board may speak in the name of the community. But which community? The landlord family that historically controlled a property? The clerical network that manages a shrine? The local committee that decides who belongs? The poor tenant? The sanitation worker? The artisan caste Muslim? The widow? The orphan?
If beneficiaries cannot question management, the trust becomes paternalism. If Pasmanda Muslims cannot access graveyards, schools, or welfare funds, the word “community” becomes a cover for hierarchy.
This is why any serious waqf reform must include social accountability, not only digitisation and audits.
Public dashboards cannot fix social exclusion by themselves. GPS mapping cannot ensure burial rights. Annual accounts cannot guarantee representation. Legal compliance cannot replace dignity.
A fair waqf system would ask:
Who sits on the managing committee?
Are Pasmanda Muslims represented in decision-making?
Are women beneficiaries visible in welfare planning?
Are burial grounds governed by written, non-discriminatory rules?
Are scholarship and relief schemes publicly announced?
Are application processes simple enough for poor families?
Can beneficiaries file complaints without fear of retaliation?
The waqf debate often gets trapped between religious autonomy and state control. Pasmanda exclusion forces a third question: what about internal democracy?
The Waqf Amendment Act 2025 sits inside this crisis of trust
The Waqf Amendment Act, 2025 claims to address long-standing problems through digitisation, mandatory audits, and stronger state oversight. On paper, these are not unreasonable goals.
A system holding lakhs of properties should have clean digital records. It should publish income and expenditure. It should face regular audits. It should have clear lease terms. It should protect properties from illegal occupation. It should not operate through informal influence and closed registers.
Many Muslim citizens know this from experience. They do not need hostile television debates to tell them waqf institutions are poorly managed. They have seen vacant land disappear. They have seen shops leased cheaply to insiders. They have seen committees fight over shrines while schools and clinics remain underfunded.
At the same time, distrust of state-led reform is not paranoia.
Muslim scholars and several critics argue that the Act is also about political control over Muslim charitable assets. The Supreme Court stayed parts of the Act in February 2026, reflecting the seriousness of concerns around legality, autonomy, and the balance of power.
Both claims can be true at once.
The waqf system has failed many of its beneficiaries. The State proposing to audit and supervise it may not be purely disinterested in the assets.
Indian minorities know that governance reform does not happen in a political vacuum. Measures framed as transparency can become tools of surveillance or control if safeguards are weak. Boards can be weakened rather than improved. Community institutions can be made more dependent on governments that do not always act neutrally. Valuable land can become vulnerable to pressure in the name of correction.
The challenge is to reject both forms of evasion.
One evasion says, “Do not criticise waqf mismanagement because that helps anti-Muslim politics.”
The other says, “Because waqf boards are mismanaged, the State should be trusted with sweeping control.”
Neither protects the poor.
A serious view must hold the middle with courage. Waqf institutions need strong audits, open records, social inclusion, and professional management. State power needs constitutional limits, judicial scrutiny, and protection against majoritarian capture.
Reform must not become a land transfer project. Autonomy must not become a shield for corruption.
What real waqf accountability should look like
Waqf reform should start with the purpose of waqf, not with the power struggle around it. The first question should be simple: does this property serve the beneficiaries for whom it was endowed?
If the answer is unclear, the system needs correction.
Public records should be readable, not just digital
Digitisation is useful only when it changes power on the ground. A scanned document hidden in a database does not help a poor family, a local journalist, or a community group.
Each waqf property should have basic public information available in plain language:
Information that should be public | Why it matters |
Property location and area | Helps communities detect encroachment |
Legal status and pending disputes | Shows whether income is blocked by litigation |
Current use | Reveals whether the property serves its purpose |
Lease holder and lease amount | Prevents sweetheart deals and insider control |
Annual income generated | Allows comparison with local market potential |
Welfare spending linked to the property | Connects assets to beneficiaries |
Transparency should not mean exposing sensitive personal data. It should mean making institutional decisions visible.
Audits should track welfare outcomes, not only accounts
A clean balance sheet is not enough. A waqf property exists for a charitable purpose. Audits should ask where the money went and who benefited.
For example:
How many scholarships were given?
Which localities received health support?
How much was spent on graveyard maintenance?
Were widows, orphans, and disabled people included?
Did Pasmanda and other marginalised groups benefit?
Were funds concentrated around one institution or family network?
Financial audits detect leakage. Social audits detect betrayal.
Encroachment cases need time-bound action
If 59,000 properties are encroached, ordinary litigation speed will not work. Waqf institutions need dedicated legal teams, updated land records, and public case tracking. State governments also need to act against encroachers without favour.
That includes politically connected encroachers.
A poor person occupying a small corner of land and a powerful official controlling a valuable property are not the same problem. Justice should be humane in the first case and firm in the second. Yet too often, enforcement is harsh on the weak and careful around the powerful.
Real reform would reverse that pattern.
Beneficiaries need grievance rights
A trust cannot be accountable if beneficiaries have no direct route to complain.
Local waqf users should be able to report:
Denial of burial rights
Illegal occupation
Discriminatory management
Rent irregularities
Non-use of welfare funds
Closed or captured committees
Complaints should receive tracking numbers, time limits, and appeal options. Orders should be published with reasons. Protection should exist for whistle-blowers and local complainants.
This is basic governance, not radical reform.
Representation must match the community’s social reality
If waqf is meant to serve the Muslim public, its decision-making cannot remain limited to elite groups. Pasmanda Muslims, women, local beneficiaries, legal experts, finance professionals, and social welfare workers need meaningful roles.
Representation should not be decorative. It should shape budgets, priorities, burial access rules, education grants, and property use.
The test is not who gets photographed on a board. The test is who can change a decision.
The poorest beneficiary must return to the centre
Waqf is often discussed in the language of control. Who controls the land? Who controls the board? Who controls the records? Who controls the tribunal process? Who controls the amendment?
Those questions matter. But they can bury the central figure: the poor Muslim who was supposed to benefit.
That person is not an abstraction. It may be a student who needs fees. A patient who needs treatment. A widow who needs monthly support. A family that needs burial space. A neighbourhood that needs a school. A child who needs a room with a teacher instead of a locked building. A Pasmanda family that needs dignity from institutions that claim to represent all Muslims.
The waqf debate becomes dishonest when it uses this person only as a symbol.
Community leaders invoke the poor to defend autonomy, then resist local transparency. Governments invoke the poor to justify intervention, then expand control without enough safeguards. Encroachers ignore the poor entirely. Courts and tribunals see the poor only after a dispute becomes a file.
The poor beneficiary needs more than rhetoric. They need institutions that can be questioned.
A serious reform agenda would protect three things together:
The charitable purpose of waqf
Waqf assets must serve education, health, burial, relief, and welfare.
The autonomy of minority institutions
Reform should not become a route for political capture of Muslim charitable property.
The rights of internal beneficiaries
Poor Muslims, Pasmanda Muslims, women, and local users must be able to challenge exclusion and mismanagement.
Leaving out any one of these breaks the system.
Protect autonomy without accountability, and elites benefit. Enforce state control without safeguards, and political power benefits. Speak of welfare without beneficiary rights, and nobody benefits except those already in charge.
The original idea of waqf was simple and radical. Property should stop circulating for private gain and start serving public good. That is why the word contains the idea of pausing, holding, and dedicating. It asks wealth to halt before the vulnerable.
India’s waqf system now needs that moral pause again.
Not a pause that delays reform. A pause that asks who has been forgotten in every argument about land, law, and identity.
The poor Muslim waiting for the education, the hospital, the burial ground the endowment promised is not a communal argument. He is the entire point.
