An Indian government report calls the deaths of about 15,000 people a year on the country’s railway tracks a “massacre” that “no civilized society can accept.”

Most of the deaths occur at unregulated crossings, with about 6,000 deaths in Mumbai alone, the report says. Another 1,000 deaths result when people fall from coaches or from train collisions and derailments.

Many people living in Mumbai’s slums live next to four or five parallel tracks and often have no choice but to make dangerous crossings.

"Trespassing occurs because of lack of barricading, fencing, lack of adequate number of pedestrian overbridges and lack of facilities such as sufficient number of platforms, escalators, elevators for the disabled apart from insufficient train services. These are the main reasons for the heavy human death toll," the report says.

About 20 million people in India travel by train each day. The report calls on the government to replace all railroad crossings with bridges or overpasses at an estimated cost of 500 billion rupees ($10 billion) over the next five years.

With files from The Associated Press