Hyderabad: The Telangana Revenue Department has handed back control of the Waqf Board’s record room to the board after nine years, ending an arrangement put in place by the then chief minister K Chandrasekhar Rao (KCR) in November 2017.
Hyderabad Collector Dr Priyanka Ala communicated the development to Waqf Board CEO Mohammed Asadulla in a letter, stating that the handover was being made to facilitate the transfer of old records to Andhra Pradesh and to enable the uploading of Waqf property details onto the central government’s UMEED portal.
KCR had ordered the Revenue Department to seal the record room in 2017, citing the need to prevent tampering of land records. The Hyderabad Collector was subsequently appointed custodian, and a Tehsildar was posted at Haj House in Nampally to manage the retrieval of files.
Why it matters
The record room holds historical, legal and administrative documents spanning decades — including the Nizam period — written in Urdu, Persian, Arabic and English. The documents pertain to thousands of Islamic endowment properties, including mosques, dargahs and graveyards across the state.
In her letter, Ala noted that old records of the Andhra Pradesh State Waqf Board had remained with the Telangana board despite repeated requests from the AP government, the Central Waqf Council and the Government of India for their transfer. The CEO had sought release of the record room to resolve this and to complete the UMEED portal uploads, she said.
The handover comes days after several Muslim organisations, at a meeting convened by Tehreek Muslim Shabban on June 15, demanded the record room be reopened. The groups had flagged difficulties in accessing legal documents, settling ownership disputes and addressing encroachments on Waqf properties.
35,000 properties on portal
Waqf Board CEO Asadulla told Siasat.com that details of around 35,000 Waqf properties in the state have already been uploaded to the UMEED portal. Of these, 2,800 pre-date the Central Wakf Act of 1954 and were under the Nizam government’s Department of Ecclesiastical Affairs. A further 33,929 properties were notified in the first survey conducted after the Act came into force.
Asadulla sought to clarify that access to the record room had not been entirely cut off during the nine-year period. “The record room was always accessible to us; it is just that a tehsildar was appointed to monitor the records. We used to take the records from the tehsildar and work. Now the collector will hand over complete control to the Waqf Board,” he said.
Once Waqf property details are fully uploaded to the UMEED portal, the Centre will decide whether the properties remain under the board’s control or revert to the Collector, he added.
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