The Hinduja group company is yet to take a decision to appointing a new head replacing Makhija. The new development comes as a surprise to the infotech industry in Bangalore since he had a stint of more than three and half years with the company.

However, a section of industry sources has said the stepping down of Makhija was expected and was a part of the organisational restructuring. According to ALIT sources, Makhija has been looking for new positions in multinational infotech companies. When contacted, Makhija was not available for comment on the issue.

The organisational reshuffle in ALIT was kicked off early this year when the company executive chairman YP Sahni quit the company and joined Global Tele-Systems. To replace Sahni, the information technology arm of the auto major had appointed a newpresident and chief executive officer - Ajit Chakravarti - a few months back.

The main purpose of roping in Chakravarti was to give a new look to the company's entire operations in India as well as abroad. He was in the process of taking the company to the new millennium by announcing a new name to ALIT.

Chakravarti told The Financial Express that currently Makhija was on leave and he would leave the organisation shortly. ``However, the resignation from the post was cordial,'' he added.

According to him, this will not have any negative impact either on the ongoing corporate restructuring or on retaining the talent available with the company. In fact, ALIT was planning to offer an employee stock option plan (ESOP) to its senior professionals.

Meanwhile, the company is learnt to have decided to postpone its board meeting which was to have been held in the third week of September in Bangalore. The meeting of the board of directors will be held in October due to some unavoidable reasons, accordingto ALIT officials.

The board is likely to take decisions on offloading a part of Ashok Leyland Ltd's equity stake to a strategic partner, setting up overseas subsidiaries in the US and Europe, fund raising programme, ESOP, among others. At present Ashok Leyland holds 90 per cent equity stake in ALIT, while the Italy-based Iveco has the rest.