District planning in India operates on a five-year cycle.  Each ministry of the Central Government and each State Government prepares a plan which is then compiled into the national five-year plan.  Bhatnagar and Jajoo (1987) developed a DSS intended to assist with the development of these plans.

The focal point of the planning is a district, which has a population of about 1 million.  District level plans for each sector are passed upwards to the state level where they are consolidated for all districts.  Prior to the development of the DSS, the exercise of communications  between and among state headquarters and the district to finalize a plan may have taken seven to eight months.

In addition, two key decisions in these Five Year Plans are made arbitrarily due to the unavailability of the necessary information .  These are:  (a)  a district- wise allocation of the total available budget for the department;   and (b) selecting a specific location choice for a particular facility.

An earlier version of th DSS was developed.  Overall, it was considered a success.  Almost everyone who saw it recognized its potential to serve as an aid to planning within a district.  However, it was recognized that such applications could be developed only if computers supporting graphic facilities were available within the state and district.  At that time such graphics facilities were not accessible.

Since today's microcomputers offer reasonable graphic facilities, a second version was created with vastly improved interaction capabilities.  This second system provided more general data structures and improved command language structure to simplify interaction.  The commands allowed selection of villages from a table on the basis of their attributes, like the existence of a particular type of facility or the distance from it.  Other sets of commands display a set of villages on a maap, allow interaction with the displayed map, and produce a printed report on the selected villages.  The software was table driven, offering the flexibility of carrying out various types of analysis by using the commands in an appropriate sequence.

This DSS was accepted because five key benefits were provided by the system:  (a) the graphics and maps created a level of understanding which went above and beyond the level which could be achieved without a DSS;  (b) the illustrative graphics helped to create integration across governmental departments;  (c) the quality of decisions were enhanced and the time taken to create the plans was reduced greatly;  (d) the integrated data offered an easy tool to determine relative allocatins among departments based on existing facilities rather than on the basis of the national norm, thereby creating a better balance of distributionl;  and (e) it provided an accurate assessment of a district's "backwardness indicator" which is often used for allocating funds.  Overall, it was determined that the extensive graphical interface was the biggest selling feature for the users.

The District Planning DSS example provided insight into the user interface issues when designing a DSS for India.  In particular it suggested that the graphical images help to cross across cultural and communication barriers in India to make the system more usable.