A man armed with an axe has killed five girls and four women during a rampage in central India.

The killings took place in Behratoli village in the remote state of Chhattisgarh, district police chief Govardhan Singh Darroh said.

Police are not certain of the motive but they say 35-year-old suspect Pandu Nagesia, known as Panduram, had recently split from his wife and may have been suffering from a mental breakdown.

The girls were aged between two and nine.

A 25-year-old woman and three women over 60 were also killed.

"The accused Nagesia first attacked a 25-year-old woman and her two-year-old child and axed them to death, subsequently killing his neighbours one after another," the police chief said.

"The accused seems to be mentally disturbed after his wife deserted him," he added, after Nagesia was taken into custody and the axe recovered from the village, 625 kilometres north of the state capital Raipur.

An eyewitness said the incident happened in the early afternoon, when some women and children had assembled at a house after their male relatives had gone to work in a nearby mine, the Press Trust of India reported.

Another police officer investigating the case said the accused had locked himself in a room after killing the women and refused to open the door when the police reached the village.

Village elders have told police that Nagesia rarely ventured out of his home and never allowed his neighbours to enter the house.

Local officials have announced compensation of 25,000 rupees ($435) each for the families of the deceased, the Press Trust of India said.

Attacks on Indian women have been in the global spotlight since December, when a 23-year-old student was brutally attacked and raped by six men on a moving bus in the capital New Delhi.

She died two weeks later of her injuries.

The case prompted outrage at home and abroad, prompting parliament to toughen laws to make the country safer for women.

Since the Delhi case, a string of other attacks have hit the headlines, including the gang-rape of a Swiss cyclist in central Madhya Pradesh state last month.

On Wednesday four sisters walking home in north India suffered severe burns after being attacked with acid by two men on a motorbike - a brutal example of another growing problem in South Asia.

ABC/Reuters