A 40-year-old man had his genitals chopped off with a meat cleaver after a lynch mob discovered him trying to rape a teenage girl in an isolated street, UK MailOnline reported. The Indian man is currently reported to be in critical condition at a Rajasthani hospital.

Upon hearing the teenage girl's screams for help in Ganganagar, in India's northwestern Rajasthan state, angry locals caught Suresh Kumar down an alley, attempting to hold the victim against a wall. Deciding to take the law under their own hands, a tactic known to be common in India, the mob dragged Kumar to a butcher's shop for punishment.

After locals held a quick community meeting, Kumar was beaten with sticks for an hour and then castrated with a meat cleaver. The vigilantes then dumped the severed remains in the middle of the road, with a bloodied Kumar lying nearby, India Today reported.

"No one went to help the man because they could see his penis on the ground and knew this was punishment for a sex crime," Aamir Dhawan, a 30-year-old local witness, said.

"We have had a lot of intolerable offences against women in this country recently, with girls being raped, hung, and molested, and it's time it stopped."

"This sends out a very strong message to anyone like that - if you do it you will be punished," he said.

The incident was, however, criticized by the police, who called for those responsible to come forward and hand themselves in, saying it was not the citizen's duty to take the law into their "own hands."

"As deplorable as these crimes are, law and order has to be maintained, and not lynch justice," a police spokesman said.

"We ask those men who carried out this attack to hand themselves in before we find them."

Meanwhile, while Kumar was admitted to a hospital, the teenage victim was being provided with counseling and given treatment for shock.

The castration follows a string of violent sex crimes in India that have prompted vigilante justice, according to UK MailOnline.

In September, police arrested three men after a semi-naked body of a teenage girl was discovered near a railway track in eastern India. The victim was allegedly raped and murdered after she protested against village elders' harassment of her father, NDTV network quoted villagers as saying.

In a separate June incident, a 10-year-old girl was dragged from her home, as the entire village watched, to a nearby forest, where she was raped by a 25-year-old man on the orders of a village council in the eastern Indian state of Jharkhand. The revenge rape was carried out in retaliation for an alleged molestation charge blamed on her brother.

Pictures of the incident can be viewed here. (Graphic Warning: Nudity)