The incresing fuel demand, prices and environmental impacts are the major concern associated with conventional fossile fuels. To overcome all these, the hunt for sustainable, non toxic , renewable and low cost alternative fuels is the need of the hour. The present investigation is aimed to reduce the emission and to improve the performance of diesel engine, the fuel reformer technique has been employed. In this connection an attempt is made to study on performance and emissions of a Catalytic Fuel Reformer (CFR) in CI engine using red mud catalyst. Experimental results concluded that the performance and emission level are better than those of diesel fuel. The engine shows that the red mud 300 shows higher BTE is 7.44% than red mud 200 at full load than diesel fuel under full load. Red mud 300 shows 13.14% decrease in carbon monoxide compared to diesel fuel at maximum load, slight reduction of NOx emission for red mud 300, whereas red mud 200 shows remarkable reduction upto 75% of the load and almost equal to that of diesel fuel and red mud 300 at the maximum load