BANGALORE, INDIA: In a day of swift developments, two independent directors M Rammohan Rao and Vinod K. Dham and non-executive director Krishna G. Palepu resigned from the board of Satyam Computer Services, India's fourth largest IT bellwether.

V S N Raju, secretary, Satyam Computer Services, said: "The three directors sent in their resignations from the board. We have intimated the stock exchanges."

Rammohan Rao is the dean of the internationally-reputed Indian School of Business (ISB) in Hyderabad since 2004.

Dham has been on Satyam board since January 2003. Known as the 'Father of Pentium', he is currently the managing partner of IndoUS Capital LLC, a venture capital firm in the US that invests in Indian start-ups.

Palepu, who has also been on the board since January 2003, is the Ross Graham Walker professor of business administration at the Harvard Business School.

On Dec 25, another independent director, Mangalam Srinivasan, resigned from the board.

Incidentally, Dham, Palepu and Srinivasan are all based in the US.

The spate of resignations follows the top management's aborted bid to acquire the two realty firms-Maytas Properties and Maytas Infra, run by two sons of Satyam founder chairman B. Ramalinga Raju, for $1.6 billion (Rs.79.2 billion) to bail them out of cash crunch.

Rammohan Rao is reported to have chaired the board meeting when the controversial buyout deal was approved.

In her letter to Raju, Srinivasan said she was resigning on moral grounds for not casting a dissenting note against the proposed acquisition of Maytas' at the last board meeting in Hyderabad Dec 16.

The 69-year-old Srinivasan, who was on the Satyam board since 1991, is a leading management consultant and a visiting professor at many US universities. She is also on the board of directors of Technology Information Frontiers Ltd, a Hyderabad-based computer systems design firm.