- Interise Trust is a toll-road landlord - it owns highways, collects the tolls, and passes nearly all the cash to its investors. It was born in 2018 when L&T IDPL, a pioneer of Indian public-private partnerships, settled an irrevocable trust that was registered on March 7, 2018, and subsequently acquired operational road assets with effect from May 4, 2018, into a trust structure designed to turn concrete and asphalt into a steady income stream. Everything the Trust does follows a single recurring logic: buy completed roads with long concessions, strip out construction risk, and run them with in-house management to keep the cash flowing.
Business segments
A single engine - a portfolio of 17 toll and annuity road concessions across eight Indian states, all generating cash from long-term government contracts.
1. Toll-road concessions: the cash-generating engine
The Trust owns the right to collect tolls on national and state highways for decades, earning a fee on every vehicle that passes - a pure infrastructure utility.
- Paid by the vehicle, hedged by inflation - toll rates are linked to inflation indices under the concession agreements, so when prices rise, the toll rises too, providing a built-in hedge. On some roads, the Trust receives fixed annuity payments from the government instead of, or alongside, toll revenue, removing traffic-volume risk entirely.
- A corridor portfolio, not a single bet - the roads span eight states and sit on high-density freight and passenger routes: one asset runs 244 km on the Kandla-Delhi freight corridor, another connects Chennai to Bengaluru, and a third links the pilgrimage town of Nathdwara to the Mumbai-Delhi artery. This geographic spread means no single state’s economy or alternate expressway can break the whole portfolio.
- Cash pooling keeps the weakest link strong - the Trust pools cash flows across all its project companies, so a major resurfacing job on one road does not get starved of funding just because that specific asset had a slow quarter. This is critical because every SPV must periodically carry out major maintenance, and the SPVs do not plan to maintain major maintenance reserve (MMR) sufficiently in advance.
- Digital tolling, nearly frictionless - roughly 98% of toll collections in India now come through FASTag, and the Trust uses AI-enabled cameras for incident detection and digital challans on its major corridors. The government is pushing toward barrier-less, satellite-based tolling, which would further reduce leakage and congestion.
Group structure and partners
The Trust is a self-contained asset-management platform - it owns the roads, the project manager that runs them, and an investment manager controlled by its anchor investors, eliminating third-party conflicts.
- Self-sponsored, not sponsor-led - in a first-of-its-kind structure for Indian InvITs, the Investment Manager (Interise Investment Managers Limited) is owned directly by the Trust’s anchor global investors, not by the original sponsor L&T. This means the manager’s interests are aligned with unitholders, not a parent construction company.
- The trustee holds the ring - IDBI Trusteeship Services Limited acts as the independent trustee, and the Trust is required under SEBI InvIT Regulations to distribute not less than 90% of net distributable cash flows to unitholders each year.
- A unified brand after the L&T exit - when Larsen & Toubro moved to sell its entire stake in L&T IDPL, the platform rebranded from IndInfravit Trust to Interise Trust in 2023, with the Trust, Investment Manager, and Project Manager all operating under a single name. The Investment Manager’s board has five independent directors, a super-majority that bakes institutional governance into the structure.