A Qualitative Decision-Support Model for Evaluating Indian States and Union Territories

This paper “A qualitative decision-support model for evaluating Indian states and Union Territories” deals with hierarchically defining the requirements for sustainable development of India by analysing socio-economic indicators and presenting qualitative results. India is one of the most diversified nation in terms of social, cultural and economic factors. As per the International Monetary Fund’s (IMF) world economic database, 2012, India ranks as 10th largest economy in the world by nominal Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and 3rd largest in the world by its purchasing power parity. But, to develop a sustainable nation which is at peak of diversity requires further considerations at deeper levels rather than the global variables referred by GDP. Therefore, further sub-categories relating to the socio-economic development of India need to be considered to analyze the standard of living and development of its dwellers, who are the major stakeholders of any sustainable nation. This work deals with the development of qualitative parameters for measuring the overall current condition of states of India based on such socio-economic indicators using a multiple-attribute decision making (MADM) tool called DEXi. DEXi is a widely used decision making tool which provided an effective qualitative data for various important attributes concerning different states in India and their state of holistic development. DEXi is a complete shell for qualitative multi-attribute decision modeling and support. During the last decade, it has been applied several times in complex real-world decision-making. Further, Modified Digital Logic (MDL) is also used for assigning weights to different attributes to produce an effective and suitably weighed analytical results. The qualitative data is reasoned from actual quantitative data which is analyzed using DEXi. The socio-economic indicators used for the analysis are education; basic living, awareness and health care; economic status and energy consumption; crime and public protection and social status of women. These six main topics are further subdivided to make a deeper level in the hierarchy and henceforth, provide useful and ease to interpret qualitative results using linguistic terms. For e.g.; for any state, under the basic living, awareness and health care indicator; households having safe drinking water facility, households having permanent structure, media exposure, HIV awareness, hospitals (per unit population) and life expectancy at birth are the sub categories considered. The result of this in-depth MADM analysis provides the measurement of root socio-economic causes in different states of India. This work emphasizes on different weak points of the Indian states (including the capital; Delhi) and provides with different areas on which improvements can be made to for improving the conditions of states and nation as a whole. This analysis can be acted upon any developing nation which aims to find the variables effecting its socio-economic development. Hence, the work could be mainly used by developing nations like Asian nations like China and many African and European nations like Nigeria, Kenya, Somalia, etc. This study can help policy makers (for e.g.; for the amendments in energy policy) and higher level dignitaries involved in strategic development of five year plans to address to the issues of great importance