Small Industries Development Bank of India (SIDBI) is the principal financial institution for the promotion, financing and development of industry in the small scale sector.

SIDBI has been implementing various measures / activities to ensure that the Indian SME sector becomes globally competitive. One such initiative is the SME Financing and Development Project, a multi agency / multi activity project addressing both demand and supply side issues concerning Indian SMEs. This is being attempted through provision of financial and non financial services. Developing Market based Business Development Services is the cornerstone of the project which shall have pan India coverage (15 - 20 clusters). It carries an objective of evolving the select clusters as ‘Role Model’ with sustainability and replicability attributes. In the first phase project has chosen eight clusters. Out of these 3 clusters have been chosen for Kick start and Kanpur is one of them.

Infrastructure Leasing and Financial Services (IL&FS) has been selected by SIDBI for implementation of BDS component of the project in the Kanpur leather cluster. Under the cluster approach, business development services are slated to be provided by three categories of providers including government support institutions (like the Council of Leather Exports, the Central Leather Research Institutes and IIT-K, etc), industries associations and private BDS providers like online business platforms (fibre2fashion) etc.