The Lucknow-New Delhi Tejas Express was flagged off on 4 October 2019 by Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath, with commercial services beginning the next day. It is routinely called India's 'first private train', but the description is loose: the operator is IRCTC, a listed central public sector enterprise under the Ministry of Railways, not a private company. What made it a first was the operating model - IRCTC sets the fare, handles ticketing, catering, on-board staff and passenger compensation for delays, and pays Indian Railways a haulage charge for the use of tracks, stations and the locomotive. The Sprite arrangement extends that same commercial logic from services to the train's name itself. 'Tejas' is a class of train rather than a single service: the first Tejas Express ran between Mumbai CSMT and Karmali from 22 May 2017, introducing airline-style amenities such as on-board infotainment screens, Wi-Fi, CCTV and fire and smoke detection on Indian Railways. India's second IRCTC-run Tejas, between Ahmedabad and Mumbai Central, had its inaugural run on 17 January 2020.

Passenger fares do not cover the cost of running passenger services on Indian Railways, and the gap is met by freight earnings and the budget. Non-fare revenue - advertising, station commercialisation, land leasing, parking, content and co-branding - is the stream the Railways has been trying to grow precisely because it does not require a politically difficult fare increase. Until now that effort stopped at exterior advertising wraps and station hoardings. Selling the train's spoken name changes the category: the brand enters the public announcement system, the signage and the passenger's own vocabulary. For the exam, the significant points are the model rather than the beverage - a commercial brand renting the identity of a public service asset for a fixed term, an operator (IRCTC) that is a CPSE and not a private firm, and the haulage-charge arrangement that keeps ownership of the infrastructure with Indian Railways. The obvious counter-arguments are equally examinable: dilution of a public utility's identity, questions about advertising nutritionally poor products through a state platform, and the risk of confusion when a service's legal name and announced name differ.