Shruti Srivastava / Lucknow September 15, 2008, 5:48 IST The Small Industries Development Bank of India (SIDBI) is keen on developing a leather cluster in Kanpur. The bank also wants to develop a testing lab for leather products in association with Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur (IIT-K). The bank is also working on a plan to develop a common effluent plant in the city under the public private partnership model. SIDBI is already at an advanced stage of talks with the Kanpur Leather Association and a private company to partner for the project. The Kanpur leather industry has been losing ground due to poor infrastructure and lack of adequate support from the government. Basant Seth, deputy general manager, SIDBI, said the bank had conducted a study with a view to designing and implementing interventions for market growth using business development services (BDS) in the leather cluster. The promotion of market-oriented BDS in selected SME clusters is one of the components of a project supported by International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, UK-based Department for International Development (DFID), KfW and GTZ, with the purpose to foster a substantially improved framework for the development of SMEs in both rural and urban areas. SIDBI is the implementing agency and the Banking Division of Department of Economics Affairs of the Ministry of Finance is the nodal agency for this project. The project aims to create an enabling framework for financing of SMEs by the bank, mitigating banks