Automated fingerprint matching is considered as the most challenging phase of fingerprint recognition since it can be affected by a variety of factors such as noise, skin condition, rotation, distortions and displacements. When there is a large database, the search time to get a matching fingerprint will be relatively high. To reduce the searching time in the database, we have proposed a minutiae tree based indexing method in this paper. The database is represented in the form of a minutiae tree and the fingerprint matching is done by visiting the nodes in the tree where the local configuration of the minutiae is stored. By using this tree structure it is found that the search time or matching time can be considerably reduced and the matching time is independent of the number of fingerprints enrolled in the database. Our framework is scalable and the experiments conducted explores its ability to find correct matches with minimal search time.