Creating provisions for domestic lighting is important for rural development. Its significance in rural economy is unquestionable since some activities, like literacy, education and manufacture of craft items and other cottage products are largely dependent on domestic lighting facilities for their progress and prosperity. Thus, in rural energy planning, domestic lighting remains a key sector for allocation of investments. For rational allocation, decision makers need alternative strategies for identifying adequate and proper investment structure corresponding to appropriate sources and precise devices. The present study aims at designing a model of energy utilisation by developing a decision support frame for an optimised solution to the problem, taking into consideration four sources and six devices suitable for the study area, namely Narayangarh Block of Midnapore District in India. Since the data available from rural and unorganised sectors are often ill-defined and subjective in nature, many coefficients are fuzzy numbers, and hence several constraints appear to be fuzzy expressions. In this study, the energy allocation model is initiated with three separate objectives for optimisation, namely minimising the total cost, minimising the use of non-local sources of energy and maximising the overall efficiency of the system. Since each of the above objective-based solutions has relevance to the needs of the society and economy, it is necessary to build a model that makes a compromise among the three individual solutions. This multi-objective fuzzy linear programming (MOFLP) model, solved in a compromising decision support frame, seems to be a more rational alternative than single objective linear programming model in rural energy planning. (C) 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.