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A ten-year-old girl who fought off rapists survived with 60% burns - after being stripped, drenched in petrol and set ablaze by her attackers.

The schoolgirl told police two unidentified men in a village in Jharkhand in eastern India had tossed her into an abandoned well for resisting their advances.

Police have filed attempted rape and murder charges against two men who are reported to have gone missing.

They have also detained five suspects for questioning, the Hindustan Times reported.

The girl was playing outside her home in Kandra, Seraikela-Kharsawan, on Wednesday morning when two men turned up and tried to lure her away with sweets.

When the girl refused, they picked her up by force and took her to a stone-crushing unit in the village, police said.

There the pair stripped her and tried to rape her.

(Image: Getty)

The unnamed 10-year-old told police that when she resisted and tried to escape, the men caught her, poured kerosene on her back, set her ablaze and threw her into an abandoned well.

Her attackers then swiftly fled the scene - as, despite her burns, she began to shout for help.

The girl's cries were luckily heard by a woman passing by.

Locals pulled the girl out and informed her parents and police, the newspaper reported. She was then rushed to hospital.

“The victim gave her statement to the police. We have registered a case.

"The girl said that she could identify the men, but did not know them by name,” an official associated with the case said, as quoted by the Indian Express .

(Image: REUTERS)

Police are reported to have recovered a jerry can, match sticks and burned clothes belonging to the girl - but they are struggling to find witnesses despite the attack being carried out in broad daylight.

The men who were detained were not locals, Kandra police station in-charge Arvind Kumar Singh said, according to the Hindustan Times.

The girl’s family recently moved to Kandra from West Bengal, and police were investigating if an acquaintance may have been involved in the assault, Singh said.

Sexual violence in India caused an outrage across the country and overseas in 2012, when a 23-year-old Delhi student was gang-raped on a moving bus and later died in hospital.

That attack led to mass street protests about the high levels of violence against women, and prompted the Indian government to toughen jail sentences for rapists.

Perpetrators found guilty now receive a minimum 20 years in prison, instead of the previous 10 years. The maximum sentence is life behind bars.

Despite public demonstrations and changes in legislation, rape and violence against women is a frequent occurrence in India.

At least 34,651 cases of rape were reported in 2015, statistics released by the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) showed.

Victims knew their offenders in 33,098 of those cases.