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Abstract: In the context of rural India, planning is mainly prescriptive (through mandated schemes) and top–down (by extension community from the line departments). Realizing the above mode of planning and the increasing demand for Geographical-Information & Communication Technology (Geo-ICT) applications in the rural systems in India, a prototype distributed collaboration tool, called GramyaVikas (rural development), has been developed to assist the rural extension community in their own decision-making processes in a more interactive, integrated and coordinated manner. GramyaVikas, evolved out of the needs assessment of the user community, is a secure and cost-effective system developed for defined users with open source (a) content management system and (b) Geographical Information Systems. This web-based tool will help the users to share and retrieve data/information; communicate for taking mutual decisions; make useful queries on spatial and nonspatial database to identify candidate villages/entities; and generate various views or scenarios for different rural development schemes. Presently, this Geo-ICT tool is being developed in an Intranet environment. The resulting system is intended to assist the remote users in analyzing rural-informatics for rural development planning decisions online, with customized GIS tools to suit the requirements of a few line departments for decision-making. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]