Difference between slum kids and street children:

The slum kids are a privileged lot when compared to street children. A clear distinction is made in this regard by the NGO Salam Baalak Trust that works with 700 odd children on the Mumbai streets. Slum kids at least have a home and a family, even though in a very poor condition, but street kids have no place or family to call their own. They live on the sides of any street and are the worst-off inhabitants in any city, and for obvious reason the most venerable. When the NGO wants to contact any one of them, a word is let out on the streets and they call back. The trust was set up after the 1980’s movie Salam Bombay and is presently suffering from acute shortage of funds.

Slumdog Millionaires
In the movie “Slumdog Millionaire” the stars were slum kids in the beginning but following the riots, when they loose their mother and house, they become street children. In real life Azhar and Rubina are still slum kids living in dirty surroundings. Azhar’s situation is very bad, as he has to sleep with rats on a bare small ground surrounded by tin walls and the roof made of plastic sheet. He does not even get regular food. On one afternoon when his parents were away to see a doctor, he kept on asking his elder sister for food, but was told that once these journalists leave she would start cooking. “They will never leave”, he said in desperation, and he was right. It was more than an hour when the parents returned that cooked food was ordered.