Slumdog Millionaire has won eight Oscars and made more than £215 million worldwide but the film’s success is still tarnished by the suggestion that it exploits real slum dwellers.

Yesterday the film-makers announced a £500,000 funding package for child poverty programmes in Mumbai that they hope will finally debunk that claim. The money will provide health education programmes for thousands of slum children and their families, administered by Plan, the international children’s charity that has 30 years’ experience in India.

The money is being donated in addition to a separate trust funded by the film-makers that looks after Rubina Ali and Azharuddin Mohammed Ismail, the two child actors from a Mumbai shanty who starred in the movie.

Christian Colson, the producer, said that the £500,000 had been put together by “some but not all of the people and organisations who have benefited from the film’s success”. The anonymous donors did not include the cinema chains, which keep about half the film’s box-office takings but “aren’t putting their hands in their pockets”.

That leaves a pot of about £160 million of which at least £100 million goes straight into repaying production, marketing and distribution costs.

The £500,000 that has been found is a significant sum in a country where 76 per cent of the population of 1.1 billion live on less than $2 a day and child malnutrition is on a par with sub-Saharan Africa, but the key will be how wisely the money is spent. It has been estimated that up to 80 per cent of funds in Indian government aid programmes are lost through corruption.

There has never been an Oscar winner or mainstream box office hit quite like Slumdog. However, from the moment that the award season bandwagon began to roll, the film has attracted controversy. It was described as a patronising misrepresentation of modern post-nuclear India and attacked as “poverty porn” that exoticised the misery of millions of Indians for a voyeuristic First World audience. Most hurtful to the film-makers were suggestions that the child stars had not been properly rewarded for their part in the film’s success.

Mr Colson said that a trust (the Jai Ho Trust) to look after them had been set up before shooting began, providing their families with a “decent but basic standard of living” and a lump sum for each child. He acknowledged that they had been unprepared for the “media storm” over the children at the time of the film’s release in India and their trip to the Oscars.

Rubina Ali still lives in Garib Nagar, a small, filthy slum in Mumbai, although the Jai Ho Trust intends to rehouse her family in an apartment. Outside her one-room home is an open sewer. Mounds of smouldering rubbish cloud the air with acrid smoke.

Last night The Times met Rafiq Asghar Ali Quereshi, Rubina’s father. He said he was disappointed that they were still living in the slum but that he expected to be moved to a new home soon. Asked whether his daughter had been paid fairly for her part in the film, Mr Quereshi said: “At the time I thought so. Now that we see it has done so well, I am not sure.”

Rubina has continued to work. Her father claims that she recently earned more for a short appearance in a drinks commercial with Nicole Kidman than she did for Slumdog. “If she earns, maybe then we can afford a proper home,” he said.

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