HYDERABAD, India — SKS Microfinance, a once-admired lender to poor Indian women that has had a stunning fall from grace in the last year, said Wednesday that its executive chairman, Vikram K. Akula, would step down from his post.

Mr. Akula in 1997 started the company that would become SKS as a nonprofit organization aimed at lifting Indians out of poverty by giving them loans of as little as $100 to start businesses — a type of loan operation known as microlending. The organization eventually turned in a for-profit direction, and made a public stock offering in August 2010.

Mr. Akula is leaving as SKS is trying to overcome large losses in its home state of Andhra Pradesh, where about 90 percent of its borrowers stopped repaying loans late last year. The state, of which Hyderabad is the capital, severely restricted lending after politicians criticized SKS and other microlenders of being too aggressive in collecting repayments from impoverished families and driving some borrowers to suicide — a contention that lenders strongly deny.

P. H. Ravikumar, a board member and former commercial banker, will become chairman of SKS. Mr. Akula, who will serve as a consultant to the company until March, said in a statement that his next venture would involve a “mobile banking initiative” unrelated to SKS. SKS is trying to raise 9 billion rupees, or about $180 million, in an additional stock offering to shore up its reserves, which have been depleted somewhat because of its problems in Andhra Pradesh. The company reported a 3.9 billion rupee ($73.6 million) loss in its most recent quarter, compared to a profit of 810 million rupees a year earlier.

The company’s shares have fallen to about one-tenth of their peak level last year. On Wednesday, after news reports speculated that Mr. Akula would be stepping down, shares of SKS closed up 5 percent, to 115.45 rupees.

A company spokesman, J. S. Sai, said Mr. Akula would not be available for an interview, and Mr. Akula did not respond to a text message.

About 15 months ago, SKS was on a much different track. Its share price was surging in the weeks after the company raised $350 million in a public offering in the Indian stock market. The offering was expected to be the first of many by rapidly growing Indian microlenders.

But under the surface, politicians, social activists and others were increasingly critical of SKS and the industry, particularly because the companies were earning record profits even as they charged poor women interest rates of 30 to 65 percent. There was also growing evidence that the microcredit, even if it did give the poor a small boost, often did not lift them out poverty, as the lenders had claimed. And a sizable minority of borrowers appeared to have become overly indebted because of the ease with which they could borrow money from competing lenders.

Mr. Akula, a child of Indian immigrants who grew up in Schenectady, N.Y., became a target of much of that ire. He had established a global reputation as a social entrepreneur working to eliminate poverty, appearing at the World Economic Forum and other big global events to extol the benefits of microcredit. But his credibility was eroding in Hyderabad, where SKS is based.

A few months before the initial public offering, he had sold all of his SKS shares, worth about $13 million, in a private sale.

Late last year, politicians in Andhra Pradesh cited the public offering, and what they said was a surge of suicides by borrowers, to pass a law that severely restricted new lending and made it harder for companies to collect loan repayments. Local leaders barred loan officers from entering many villages or forbade borrowers to repay their debts, SKS and other lenders reported.

In addition to the troubles at SKS, other large Indian microlenders like Basix, Share and Spandana are struggling with loan defaults. They are all trying to raise money from investors and renegotiate their own debts with banks.

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