About the Indian Rail crash
“India’s rail network has seen 58.580 lakh passengers in 2022-23, but has fallen short of the traffic measured during 2019-20, before the COVID-19 pandemic, by 24%” (the Indian Times)
A lakh is 100,000 – so 58,580 lakh is 5,858,000,000 or nearly six billion journeys
I couldn’t find stats for fatalities, but I found this on Sky News about notable crashes
November 2016: An express train derailed in Uttar Pradesh, killing 146 people and injuring more than 200.
January 2017: In Andhra Pradesh, 41 people died when several coaches of a passenger train left the track.
October 2018: At least 59 people died in Amritsar city, northern India when a commuter train crashed into a crowd gathered on the track for a festival. Fifty-seven people were injured.
So put all this together and that is a very very low accident rate on the railways. Just to give a more rounded picture – and it doesn’t take away from the poverty, and the sadness of it.
For comparison of fatalities only – 893 railroad deaths in the United States in 2021
How many passenger journeys? Difficult to get statistics because of all the separate railways, but for Amtrak – over 30 million passengers per year – only a fraction of the rail journeys in India