Leather industries use very broad spectrum of chemicals covering inorganic, natural organic and synthetic organic compounds during the manufacture of leather. The transformation of the raw hide into leather products involves several processing steps consuming considerable amounts of water influence, BDI ratio of the raw effluent is about 0.23-0.25. Even After physicochemical treatment it shows the low biodegradability improvement. For this reason, more efficient methods advanced oxidation processes have been proposed to improve the biodegradability. Among the AOPs, the most widely used technique is solar Fenton process are the most promising technologies for the treatment of tannery waste water. In this study, an attempt was made to assess the feasibility of enhancing the biodegradability of tannery effluent using solar Fenton oxidation process and to study the effect of operating variables viz, pH, concentration of H<inf>2</inf>O<inf>2</inf>, dosage of Fe2+ and solar exposure contact time on biodegradability and to study the extent of Biodegradation of solar Fenton treated tannery effluent by anaerobic biological process. The raw tannery wastewater from an industry, located near Chennai was characterized for pH, BOD, COD, TDS, and TSS. The wastewater has very low biodegradability measured in terms of biodegradability index (BDI), was 0.24;COD recalcitrant(COD<inf>R</inf>) and biorefractory index(BRI) was 3195 and 0.76 respectively. So there is need to improve the biodegradability by solar Fenton process. A laboratory scale study on the biodegradation by solar Fenton process was carried out in a 2L capacity of glass tray of size 16x8x8cm. 500ml of raw effluent was taken in a glass tray. Each experiment was conducted by keeping any two variables constant and varying the third one. The treated sample were analysed for biodegradability in terms of biodegradability index (BDI), COD recalcitrant(COD<inf>R</inf>) and biorefractory index(BRI). From the biodegradability studies the maximum percent increase in (BDI) was found at H<inf>2</inf>O<inf>2</inf> 20g/L, Fe2+ 0.5g/L, pH 3, solar exposure contact time 15 min and liquid depth 1.5 cm. When the experiments were conducted at optimal conditions, the increase in BDI was 81%, the reduction in COD<inf>R</inf> and BRI were 50% and 25%. The feasibility of further degradation of solar Fenton treated tannery wastewater by biological process (anaerobic process) was studied in batch mode. The solar Fenton treated sample with inoculums gave maximum amount of biogas production was added at the rate of 0.28 m3/day was 412ml and also gave 79% of COD removal. The overall performance of the combined photochemical and biological treatment for COD removal was 85%.From the above concluded that feasibility on enhancement of biodegradability of tannery wastewater, using solar Fenton process was attended and found to be effective for this wastewater. © 2015 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.