Industrial development plays a momentous role in all walks of development. The empirical investigations of world famous works pursued by Simon Kuznets(1966) Chennery(1980), Hoffman(1958), Murray & Bryce(1960) and Kaldor(1978) found that there is a positive and significant association between industrial development and overall development of a nation. In this paper an attempt is made to assess the various dimensions of industrial development of Tamil Nadu, India. To examine the performance of the industrial economy of Tamil Nadu, statistics have been collected from Annual Survey of Industries, published by Central Statistical Organization, Government of India. The variables administered in this work to evaluate the performance of agro based and non agro based manufacturing industries of Tamil Nadu include number of factories, productive capital, employment, value of output and value added. This study covers the period of three decades form 1980-81 to 2010-11, so as to understand the effects of the new economic policy. Further, the entire study period has been classified into two folds as pre reform period (1980-81 to 1990-91) and post reform period as (1991-92 to 2010-11).