9-year-old boy mauled to death by stray dogs in Andhra Pradesh's Balijipeta

He succumbed to his injuries on the way to the hospital.

Attacks from stray dogs have been problems from different parts of the country. (Image for representational purposes only)

In a shocking incident, a nine-year-old boy has been mauled to death by street dog in northern Andhra Pradesh.

The victim, identified as R Jaswanth, was rushed to the hospital, but succumbed to injuries on the way. He was a Class III student in the government school in his village. He was a resident of the Ammapalli village near Balijipeta, about 150 km north of Visakhapatnam.

Jaswant was reportedly going to a farm in his village when the attack happened, news agency ANI reported. It is not clear what caused the dog to attack the boy.

Stray dogs have been reported as a menace from different parts of the country in recent years. The issue has been an especially hot-button topic in Kerala. In that state alone, the number of reported cases of people bitten by stray dogs was a whopping 53,000. In May last year, a 50-year-old fisherman succumbed to his injuries after being mauled by a pack of stray dogs in Trivandrum's Pulluvila. Prior to that, a 75-year-old man was found dead after being allegedly attacked by a pack of stray dogs in Kerala's Attingal.

Before that, stray dogs were seen as a massive problem in Bengaluru, where a child was killed by a pack of dogs.

More recently, stary dogs have been reported as a menace in as wide-ranging laces as Delhi, Noida and Odisha's Bhubaneswar. They have also been reported to have become an issue in Punjab's Nabha, Karnataka's Mysuru, Pune in Maharashtra and Ladakh in Jammu & Kashmir.

The most common response of local administrations has been mass culling campaigns, that are usually met with outrage from animal rights activists. They advocate mass sterilisation drives as a more humane alternative to killing the dogs en masse.

(With inputs from ANI)