Slum life might not be a dead-end for kids in Dharavi, India. Photo: lecercle (flickr)

Even before it cashed in on eight Oscars, Slumdog Millionaire had sparked a global conversation around the film's depiction of slum life in India.

Critics say Slumdog's dramatized images of destitution, squalor and prostitution send a distorted message to audiences. It also overlooks the resilience of India’s hardworking slum-dwellers, Gautaman Bhaskaran writes in the Japan Times:

Is this not what the developed West wants to see of India: its underbelly of crime, corruption and poverty that appears all black, dark and depressing, with little gray or goodness?

Meanwhile, economist Howard Husock draws a more hopeful message from the film: that slum life is not, in all cases, inescapable.

By finding a hero who rises from shacks and degradation, the film reflects a surprising new consensus that even as slums proliferate around the world at a greater scale than ever before, they could, with the right mix of policies, be the launching pads for upward mobility rather than dead-ends.

Over the last half-century, slums around the world have been transformed from temporary settlements into thriving urban centers, Husock writes in Forbes. In Mumbai’s Dharavi slum (where Slumdog was shot), small businesses are multiplying at a staggering rate.

But residents in Dharavi, Asia’s largest slum, are less concerned about entrepreneurship and infrastructure than they are about a redevelopment project that would demolish their community. A plan to convert shanties into upscale apartments and office towers would uproot Dharavi residents from homes where they’ve lived for years — in some cases, for generations.

"This city has always been about diversity of habitats," urban planner and activist Rahul Srivastava told India’s Economic Times. "We have low-rises and high-rises, villages and slums. Why can't we make slums acceptable living spaces?"