SriYantra Education Catalysts

What the company does

SriYantra Education Catalysts finances and structures the physical side of schooling. The company builds and holds the campus; an established school operator runs the school. Two projects are live, in Punjab and in Delhi NCR, alongside an advisory mandate — a combined project base of roughly US$20 million.

School promoters in India are rarely short of demand. They are short of the fifteen to forty crore of patient capital needed to put up a building before the first fee is collected, and the lenders who would normally provide it want security that a not-for-profit trust cannot give. That is the gap the company works in.

The structuring principle

Everything turns on one rule. Under the line of Indian authority running from TMA Pai to Inamdar, an education trust's surplus belongs to the trust. It cannot be distributed to investors. So investor returns in every SriYantra structure arise only from arm's-length rent, licence fees and services fees paid by the school for assets and services it genuinely receives — never from the school's surplus.

It is a constraint that rules out a good deal of what gets marketed as education investment in India, and it is the reason the structures survive scrutiny.

Geography

India is the base. The UAE is the second market, where the group's presence in Dubai and the demand for new campus capacity in the Emirates line up. Africa follows the group's existing footprint in Rwanda, Zambia and Malawi. In the UAE, a later phase contemplates educational assets being brought onto the ALTXRA platform once that platform is authorised — which it is not yet.

Entity record