state government's support for the Tejpal owned and profitable "Think Fest" event in Goa. Tejpal defended Tehelka stating that Kripal was "asked to leave because of poor performance". According to Debarshi Dasgupta, it was an unusual coincidence that mining groups placed advertisements and sponsored Tehelka events just when the report was suppressed by Tehelka. Further, states a critical article in The Outlook, if Tehelka lost money in its operations, how was it able to acquire major properties in Goa? Given Tehelka purported goals and mission to fight for the public transparency, why did it secretly seek, misrepresent and receive a grant from the Goa government for the 2011 private Tehelka event to invite movie stars and other celebrities. The Tehelka and its sting targets, states the Outlook magazine, seem to be a "ruse to expand personal wealth [of Tejpal]". According to Sevanti Ninan, a former Tehelka employee and later a columnist at the Mint newspaper, this was not an isolated event. Tehelka suppressed stories related to multiple sponsors. "Whenever there was a sponsor involved for Think Fest", states Ninan, "things would get murky for Tehelka and stories would be killed". According to Maya Ranganathan, the post-Tejpal-arrest discussions and the critical examination of Tehelka have led multiple scholars to not only praise its early aim of being alternative mainstream non-conformist media, but recounted how it failed and how it allowed advertisers and those who paid to influence content published by Tehelka. Unpaid workers, amassing mountain estate Tehelka employees complained that they were not "even being paid their salaries regularly and many had to quit" in late 2000s and early 2010s, while at the same time Tehelka and Tejpal acquired "a swanky property near Nainital" and took "money from lifetime subscribers", or while the magazine's management visited London and boasted of their financial success. Similarly, the conflict of interest in the operations at Tehelka has been questioned because the magazine accepted money from Congress party's Kapil Sibal when he was a Union Minister. Allegations of double standards The former employees and journalists of Tehelka have criticized its founders and management for "lack of transparency" about the magazine's ownership, finances and who had been bankrolling their substantial annual losses. They have called the internal lack of transparency as something in stark contrast to the transparency it aims to share by publishing undercover sting operations on everyone outside of Tehelka. The Outlook quotes a