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India’s supreme court has rejected the final appeal of one of four men sentenced to death over the 2012 fatal gang rape of a woman on a bus in New Delhi.

The ruling against the man, who is one of four perpetrators, was dubbed "one step closer to justice" by the heartbroken mother of the woman killed in the attack.

It paves the way for all four men to be hanged.

The gruesome case made international headlines and exposed the scope of sexual violence against women in India, prompting MPs to stiffen penalties in rape cases.

The victim, a 23-year-old physiotherapy student whom Indian media dubbed “Nirbhaya”, or “Fearless”, because Indian law prohibits rape victims from being identified, was heading home with a male friend from a cinema when six men lured them onto a bus.

With no-one else in sight, they beat the man with a metal bar and raped the woman. The pair were dumped naked on the roadside, and the woman died two weeks later.

The assailants were tried relatively quickly in a country where sexual assault cases often languish for years. Four defendants were sentenced to death.

Another hanged himself in prison before his trial began, though his family insists he was killed.

The sixth assailant was a minor at the time of the attack and was sentenced to three years in a reform home.

One of those sentenced to death, Akshay Kumar Singh, filed his review petition earlier this month, after the other three had theirs rejected.

The supreme court rejected Singh’s appeal. His lawyer accused the judges of bowing to public pressure.

India’s president can still decide to grant Singh mercy, but that is not expected to happen.

Outside court, the victim’s mother, Asha Devi, said she was happy with the ruling.

“This is one step closer to justice,” she told reporters.

Activists say new sentencing requirements have not deterred rape, the fourth most common crime against women in India, according to government statistics.

The last hanging in India was in 2013.

The supreme court’s ruling comes amid a revived debate over sexual violence in India after several headline-grabbing cases in recent weeks.

A woman in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh was doused with gasoline and set on fire by five men on her way to attend a court hearing.

Two of the men she had accused of gang rape and they were out on bail prior to the hearing.

She died earlier this month at a hospital in New Delhi.

The burned body of a 27-year-old veterinarian was found in late November near the city of Hyderabad in southern India.

Police later fatally shot the four men being held on suspicion of raping and killing the woman after investigators took them to the crime scene.

They were taken there to reconstruct the crime when the men tried to escape and were gunned down by the officers present.

There is a lack of clarity around the shootings and is potentially an extrajudicial police killing - not uncommon in India.

It has drawn praise from people frustrated by the pace of the 2012 New Delhi case and condemnation from those who said it undermined the courts’ role.