minority shareholders to appoint or remove an independent director from the board. Independent directors are appointed as watchdogs who are expected to ensure balanced decisions by the Board of Directors and to deter fraud. In India, one out of every three directors in every board has to be ‘independent’ and they are appointed for a period of 5 years. “In the recent past, some listed companies have faced shareholder resistance in having non-executive directors re-appointed, but these are relatively rare in the Indian context,” Arka Mookerjee, partner at law firm J Sagar Associates, said in a statement to Business Insider. Advertisement