Our Take
This is not a story about a production that failed to give. The giving was real and unusually careful: a donation to educate thousands of Mumbai children, and a trust built to carry two of them, the child actors found in the slums, into safe and schooled adult lives. Most productions in this position give nothing. These filmmakers thought hard about the gift. And still, years later, the two children it was built for had arrived at opposite ends of the same hope. One built a modest, steady life. The other sold what the trust had given him and went back to where the film had found him. The trust did everything a trust can do. What it could not do was reach past the apartment and the school fees into the family, the neighborhood, and the poverty that were always going to decide the rest. That is the hard lesson of this case, and the Ledger keeps it in: giving designed in at the production level is necessary, and it is not always enough.
The record
- Donation
- $747,500 to the charity Plan (Feb 2009, before the Oscars)
- Stated goal
- Educate 5,000 Mumbai slum children over five years
- For the two child actors
- The Jai Ho Trust, named for the film's song, set up by Danny Boyle and producer Christian Colson
- Trust terms
- Schooling, housing held in trust, a monthly stipend tied to 70% attendance, assets transferred at age 18; three trustees
- Beneficiaries
- Rubina Ali and Azharuddin Mohammed Ismail, found in the Mumbai slums for the film
- 2009 disruptions
- Both families' slum homes demolished in city clearances; a now-defunct tabloid's allegation against Ali's father was denied, unevidenced, never charged
- Rubina Ali, now
- Studied fashion design; opened a beauty salon (2022); married (Nov 2023)
- Azharuddin Ismail, now
- Left school; a business failed; sold the trust apartment (~2019) and returned to slum, then village, life
- Source
- AP, Feb 2009; trust outcome per Mumbai Mirror, 2020, and later reporting
The giving here was not improvised after the Oscars. In February 2009, before the Academy Awards the film would go on to sweep, Danny Boyle and the producers announced a donation of seven hundred and forty-seven thousand dollars to the children's charity Plan, aimed at educating five thousand Mumbai slum children over five years. Boyle put it simply: a film that had taken so much from the city owed something back to it.
The more intimate instrument was the Jai Ho Trust, named for the film's Oscar-winning song and set up for the two child actors the production had found in the slums, Rubina Ali and Azharuddin Mohammed Ismail. It was a careful design: school fees, an apartment held in trust for each child, a monthly stipend that the trustees could cut if attendance fell below seventy percent, and the assets signed over to each child at eighteen. Three trustees were appointed to hold the line. By the standard of how productions usually treat children cast out of real poverty, who are usually thanked and forgotten, this was rare and serious. The filmmakers understood that the film had used these children's actual lives as its material, and that something was owed.
What the trust could not govern was everything around it. In May 2009, weeks after the film won eight Academy Awards, Mumbai authorities bulldozed the slum shanties both families lived in, part of a clearance drive, and the cruelty of the timing drew the world's press to their doorsteps. A British tabloid, since shut down, ran a sting alleging that Ali's father would sell her; he denied it, the police found no evidence, and no charge was ever brought, but the story chased the family anyway. The father died of tuberculosis in 2020. The attention that the film brought was supposed to be a blessing. Much of it landed as a weight.
The trust held to its terms. When each child turned eighteen, the apartments were handed over and the trust was closed, exactly as designed. From there the two lives moved apart. Rubina Ali kept her footing: she studied fashion design, opened a beauty salon near Mumbai in 2022, and married in 2023, a modest and self-made adulthood, not the stardom the headlines once imagined, but hers. Azharuddin Mohammed Ismail did not find the same ground. He left school, a business venture failed, and around 2019 he sold the apartment the trust had given him and moved back into a slum, and later to his family's village. The same gift, structured the same way, carried one child to steadiness and could not hold the other.
Neither outcome was the trust's to dictate. A trust can buy an apartment and pay a school. It cannot reach into a family, a neighborhood, or the gravity of poverty that pulls at a child long after the cameras leave. The production did more than almost any production does, and it was still not enough to settle how two lives would turn out. That is not an argument against giving carefully. It is the reason giving has to be designed not only into the production, but into the years that follow it, with people whose job is to stay.
"Having benefited so much from the hospitality of the people of Mumbai it is only right that some of the success of the movie be plowed back into the city."
Danny Boyle, Director, Associated Press, February 2009