The real Slumdog Millionaires: Behind the cinema fantasy, mafia gangs are deliberately crippling children for profit

Alone and afraid, Aamir was initially grateful when a ‘kind’ older couple befriended him on his arrival in Mumbai. This chaotic urban sprawl is now India’s largest city and home to more than 20 million people. More than nine million of them live in slums, raising families in shacks built from rubbish on top of open sewers. For a homeless 12-year-old child freshly arrived from the countryside, it is a terrifying place to be.

Overcrowding is now so bad in this huge metropolis that shanty towns have even sprung up in the international airport. People in rags scavenge as giant jets thunder past just feet away.

But for many on the Indian sub-continent, Mumbai will always be the city of dreams — a place of Bollywood film stars and gold-paved streets. It was certainly the image that brought Aamir here.

Fleeing a violent, drunken father in rural India — his mother had died years before — the12-year-old had sneaked on to a train bound for the city. And when he got there, he hoped to make his fortune.

It was not to be. Alighting at Victoria Station, the city’s main terminal and an architectural monument to the days of the British Raj, Aamir was penniless and bewildered. He started begging for food.


Within minutes, a couple emerged from the crowd and approached him. They gave him cakes and said they’d take him away to start a better life.

‘I thought they were maybe social workers or religious people,’ he told me.

But Aamir’s food was drugged and when he became drowsy, the couple put him in a rickshaw and took him to the city’s municipal hospital, which is where the real nightmare began.

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