India gives Slumdog child stars proper homes

The two main child stars in Slumdog Millionaire are to be given real homes for “bringing glory to India”. The Mumbai homes will go to Rubina Ali and Azharuddin Ismail, who played the younger versions of the film’s central characters, Latika and Salim."These two children have brought laurels to the country, and we have been told that they live in slums, which cannot even be classified as housing," said Gautam Chatterjee, head of the state-run Maharashtra Housing and Area Development Authority.

The rags-to-riches romance about a poor Indian boy competing for love and money on a TV game show set in Mumbai, which is part of Maharashtra state, took home eight awards from the Oscars including best picture and best director for Britain's Danny Boyle. But in the lead-up to the awards on Sunday, the film's global success was overshadowed by objections in India to its name, which some Indians find offensive; its depiction of the lives of impoverished Indians; and the treatment of the cast.
People were horrified when pictures emerged of the child stars living in squalor despite the low budget $15million movie earning about $100million since its US release in November.

Azharuddin 10, and Rubiana 9, currently live in Garib Nagar, a slum in the north of Mumbai. Rubiana stays with her family in a small one-room hut that is next to an open sewer, according to The Times newspaper, while Azharuddin’s family lives under a scrap of tarpaulin next to a bustling road. His life reflects the hardships endured by many of Mumbai's estimated nine million who live in shanty towns: his father usually earns about £1 a day collecting scrap wood but has been unable to work recently because of TB. The children’s families will be given homes under an arrangement that allows local politicians to hand out a small number of flats on a discretionary basis. Amarjeet Singh Manhas, the chairman of the Maharashtra Housing and Area Development Authority, said: “They deserve to be rewarded for the film’s success at the Oscars. The chief minister has approved this. Their families will receive notification in a couple of days.”

Director Danny Boyle and producer Christian Colson both flatly deny claims of exploiting children for the movie. They said, according o Reuters news agency, that the children were paid above local Indian wages and enrolled in school for the first time with a fund set up to pay for their education, medical emergencies and "basic living costs."
Fox Searchlight Pictures, the specialty division of 20th Century Fox studios that is behind the film, paid for visas, travel and accommodations for nine children who were in the movie to fly to Los Angeles for the Oscars.

Critics quickly dismissed the housing move by the Indian authorities as a political stunt ahead of a general election that must be held before May.

By Hayley Jarvis for SOS Children