alt Hacker NewsIndia averages 20,000 deaths by train every year. About 16 deaths per 100,000 people.
Compare to 40,000 vehicle deaths in the US (and 960 train deaths, 2.8 deaths per 100,000 people), and 177,000 vehicle deaths in India.
But India only has 1 death per _4.1 billion passenger-miles_. The US is 1 death per 2.33 billion passenger-miles.
Anecdotally, there's a _lot_ of Indians-walking-near-trains-and-getting-hit-posting-them-doing-it videos on reddit.
In any event, the OP is way off target anyway. The poor kid was in a carriage with his mom, the horse got spooked, she fell out and he leapt out to try to save her but hit his head and died.
I guess "deaths per billion passenger-miles" is not a good metric if you want to compare the US and India, because travelling by rail is simply not that popular in the US (I assume the statistic does not include metro systems?). But if you get run over by a train, it doesn't really matter if it was a freight train or a passenger train (<5% of train casualties are actual train passengers).