[wrench]

“Around 30,000 Indians died in railway accidents in 2015, according to the latest available official data”

Best in the world? Sure........

[jjotto]

Mostly from ‘human error’ caused derailments.

[Gamecock]

3,014 in Mumbai alone!

Source

[Fresh Wind]

Near as I can tell, that 30,000 number is fake news BS.

[Vigilanteman]

Considering the conditions, 30K might be a remarkably low number. Doesn't India have roughly four times the population of the United States and isn't 30K roughly our annual rate of traffic fatalities?

I'd question if our trains carried even 0.1% of the number of passengers so highway miles would be the nearest comparison.

[golux]

Not sure about that number but you've got to consider how many people use rail there, and how insane that country is generally. Runaway train? System failures? Yep, I'd rather be in India than on an Amtrak with a twenty-something snowflake looking at porn at the controls. (Remember? The fellow had an on-the-job penchant for posting pictures of himself pooing on the internet.)

[WayneS]

What the story fails to report is that the overwhelming majority of those deaths were people who were struck by trains while walking or standing on tracks.

About 200 to 300 people a year are killed in India by derailments and other accidents involving the operation of the trains themselves. That is actually not bad for a country with a population of 1.35 billion people who use passenger rail at a rate many times higher than people in this country. On average, Indian passenger rail carries over 23 million people per day. By comparison, Amtrak carries about 31 million passengers per year.