Maple Infrastructure Trust is a toll-road landlord - it owns the highways, collects the fees, and passes the cash to its investors. Originally registered in 2020 as Indian Highway Concessions Trust and renamed in 2024, it was built to acquire mature, traffic-heavy stretches of India’s national highways and hold them for decades under government concession agreements. The recurring approach is a fully integrated platform: acquisition, integration, and day-to-day operations are all run in-house by sector specialists, which keeps control tight and costs predictable across every asset the Trust owns. # Business segments A single engine - a portfolio of seven toll roads, all on long-term government concessions, all already generating cash - where the business is the roads themselves. ## 1. Toll road portfolio: a collection of government-granted highway concessions **The Trust owns seven operational toll roads across India under long-term agreements with the National Highways Authority of India (NHAI), earning inflation-linked fees from vehicles that use them every day.** - **Seven highways, one owner** - the portfolio totals roughly 3,328 lane kilometres with 18 toll plazas, spread across seven states and three critical economic corridors: the Golden Quadrilateral, the East-West Industrial Corridor, and the Delhi-NCR peripheral logistics corridor. Each road is held through a wholly-owned special purpose vehicle (SPV), giving the Trust full control over operations and cash flows. - **Concessions are the legal moat** - every asset operates under a long-term concession agreement with NHAI, with an average operating history of about 12 years and an average residual concession life of roughly 12 years still to run. The agreements include built-in adjustment mechanisms: if actual traffic falls short of targets, the concession period can be extended, and if traffic exceeds targets, the period can be shortened - protecting the Trust’s right to collect tolls over a full economic cycle. - **Freight pays the bills** - roughly 75-80% of toll revenue comes from commercial traffic - trucks and freight vehicles - which means the Trust’s income tracks industrial output and economic activity rather than discretionary passenger travel. The assets sit in resource-rich states and serve industrial hubs linked to mining, steel, cement, and power, with major customers near the corridors including JSW Bhushan Power & Steel, Mahanadi Coalfields, and UltraTech Cement. - **Bought, not built** - the Trust acquires roads that are already operational and revenue-generating, with zero exposure to under-construction assets, so it avoids construction risk entirely. Assets are sourced through competitive NHAI Toll-Operate-Transfer (TOT) auctions and through M&A transactions, with disciplined due diligence covering traffic potential, technical condition, and legal and environmental factors. - **Inflation protection built in** - toll rates are revised every year on 1 April under national highway fee rules: the base rate rises by a fixed 3% plus a portion of the increase in the Wholesale Price Index, making the revenue stream inflation-linked and predictable over the concession’s life. ## 2. Toll collection and revenue assurance: the cash register at every plaza **Every vehicle that passes through a toll plaza generates revenue that is captured, reconciled, and protected through a technology-driven system designed to minimise leakage.** - **FASTag dominance** - electronic toll collection via FASTag has reached over 98% penetration across the portfolio, which reduces cash handling, cuts revenue leakage, and enables automated reconciliation with the National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI). - **Machines watch the money** - revenue assurance systems use analytics platforms including Tableau and Power BI to integrate data from FASTag, RFID, toll management systems, and acquiring banks, generating real-time alerts for revenue dips, transaction failures, and vehicle classification errors. This means anomalies are flagged immediately rather than discovered after the fact. - **One control room, seven roads** - a centralised control centre integrates CCTV feeds, dashboards, and analytics from across the entire corridor network, giving operators real-time visibility of traffic, incidents, and plaza performance. Camera-equipped patrol vehicles continuously assess road conditions and log defects into a centralised ticketing system. - **AI spots what humans miss** - on the NCR Eastern Peripheral Expressway, AI-enabled dash cameras installed in patrol vehicles identified over 1,200 minor road defects, enabling faster repairs and improved compliance with service-level agreements. An AI-driven asset monitoring system now uses machine learning to analyse dash-cam feeds across the network, automatically converting observations into repair actions. ## 3. Maintenance and lifecycle management: keeping the roads earning **The Trust manages its highways as long-life assets, shifting from reactive fixes to preventive and planned maintenance that protects concession value over decades.** - **Lifecycle-based, not breakdown-based** - the maintenance approach is structured around preventive and planned interventions rather than waiting for things to break, using LIDAR and drone surveys to assess asset condition and schedule work before failures occur. A provision for major periodic maintenance is accrued on a straight-line basis over the period until the work is due, based on independent consultant estimates, so the cost is smoothed rather than hitting in lump sums. - **25 to 40 work zones daily** - the operations team manages between 25 and 40 concurrent work zones across the portfolio every day, anchored in a three-pronged framework covering regulatory alignment, core operations stability, and asset integration. Approximately 2,400 roadway panels were replaced during FY26 alone. - **Vendors held to a tight leash** - routine maintenance is carried out by third-party contractors, but the Trust runs a rigorous vendor management system: onboarding includes due diligence on technical capability, safety standards, and financial stability, and performance is digitally integrated into operational systems with continuous evaluation against defined service levels. The vendor base is deliberately diversified to reduce dependency on any single contractor. - **Safety and environmental credentials** - the Trust holds ISO certifications for environmental management, occupational health and safety, and road traffic safety, and was the second platform in India to secure the road traffic safety certification. It achieved zero fatalities across all assets for the second consecutive year in FY26, and solar power infrastructure across the portfolio now generates 3.7 MW of electricity. # Group structure and partners **The Trust is a SEBI-registered Infrastructure Investment Trust backed by one of the world’s largest infrastructure investors, with a governance structure that separates ownership, management, and asset custody.** - **Canadian pension fund backing** - the Sponsor is Maple Highways Pte. Ltd., a Singapore-incorporated entity that is a wholly owned subsidiary of CDPQ Infrastructures Asia Pte. Ltd., which itself is wholly owned by Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec (CDPQ), a Canadian pension fund with roughly 25 years of infrastructure investing experience and a portfolio spanning over 19 countries. CDPQ is the single largest unitholder, and the Sponsor and Sponsor Group together hold approximately 75% of the Trust’s outstanding units. - **Three-way governance split** - the Investment Manager (Maple Infra InvIT Investment Manager Private Limited) handles asset management, acquisitions, and capital raising; the Project Manager (Maple Highway Project Management Private Limited) oversees day-to-day operations and concession compliance; and the Trustee (Axis Trustee Services Limited, a subsidiary of Axis Bank) holds the assets in trust for unitholders and ensures regulatory compliance. This separation means no single entity controls both the assets and the decisions about them. - **Seven SPVs, one owner** - the Trust holds 100% equity in each of the seven project SPVs that own the toll roads, and provides unsecured debt to those SPVs at coupon rates ranging from 14% to 16% per annum. The SPVs’ borrowings are all variable-rate secured term loans from banks, and they maintain escrow arrangements and reserve accounts as required under their financing and concession agreements. - **Mandatory distribution obligation** - under SEBI InvIT regulations, the Trust is required to distribute at least 90% of its Net Distributable Cash Flows to unitholders each financial year, which aligns the structure with income-seeking investors. The Trust has maintained an [ICRA] AAA (Stable) credit rating - the highest level of creditworthiness - since its listing on the BSE in June 2023.