Were The "Slumdog Millionaire" Children Exploited?!

How ironic that a movie that sheds light on how the children of the Mumbai slums are mistreated is alleged to be guilty of exploiting those very same kids. The child actors in the smash hit "Slumdog Millionaire" have allegedly received a pittance while the movie has made millions.Here's more from the Telegraph:

"Their roles in Slumdog Millionaire have won them international acclaim and seen them rub shoulders with the film’s glamorous stars and its British director.But the reality of life for Rubina Ali and Azharuddin Ismail is far closer to that of the characters they play in the story of love, violent crime and extreme poverty in India.

The child actors’ parents have accused the hit film’s producers of exploiting and underpaying the eight-year-olds, disclosing that both face uncertain futures in one of Mumbai’s most squalid slums.

Slumdog Millionaire has won four Golden Globes and is nominated for 10 Oscars. It is on its way to making hundreds of millions of pounds in box office receipts.

The film’s British director, Danny Boyle, has spoken of how he set up trust funds for Rubina and Azharuddin and paid for their education. But it has emerged that the children, who played Latika and Salim in the early scenes of the film, were paid less than many Indian domestic servants.

Rubina was paid £500 for a year’s work while Azharuddin received £1,700, according to the children's parents.

However a spokesman for the film’s American distributors, Fox Searchlight, disputed this saying the fees were more than three times the average annual salary an adult in their neighbourhood would receive. They would not disclose the actual sum.

Both children were found places in a local school and receive £20 a month for books and food. However, they continue to live in grinding poverty and their families say they have received no details of the trust funds set up in their names. Their parents said that they had hoped the film would be their ticket out of the slums, and that its success had made them realise how little their children had been paid.

The children received considerably less than the poor Afghan child stars of The Kite Runner, who embarrassed their Hollywood producers when they disclosed that they had been paid £9,000.

Rubina and Azharuddin live a few hundreds yards from each other in a tangle of makeshift shacks alongside Mumbai’s railway tracks at Bandra. Azharuddin is in fact worse off than he was during filming: his family’s illegal hut was demolished by the local authorities and he now sleeps under a sheet of plastic tarpaulin with his father, who suffers from tuberculosis.

“There is none of the money left. It was all spent on medicines to help me fight TB,” Azharuddin’s father, Mohammed Ismail, said. “We feel that the kids have been left behind by the film. They have told us there is a trust fund but we know nothing about it and have no guarantees.”(END OF EXCERPT)Read the rest here: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/4347472/Poor-parents-of-Slumdog-millionaire-stars-say-children-were-exploited.html

This is just absolutely despicable.And it's greed over need.