Council workers have bulldozed the Mumbai home of the 10-year-old child star of Slumdog Millionaire, leaving the boy and his family homeless for the second time in two years.

Azharuddin Mohammed Ismail, who played the young Salim in the British-made film, was asleep when a police officer woke him and ordered him to leave the tarpaulin-covered shack next to a busy road. The flimsy structure was then destroyed, along with dozens of others.

"A police officer took a bamboo stick to hit me, and I was frightened," Azharuddin said. “We have nowhere to go. All our belongings and other household goods have been thrown out or damaged. We don’t know what we will eat today,”

It is thought that about 20 other children who appeared in the Oscar-winning film were also left homeless by the demolition drive, which was carried out to clear drainage paths before next month’s monsoon.

Slumdog Millionaire dazzled audiences around world and won eight Oscars, but its makers have been criticised for not sharing more of the profits with the two child actors that they plucked from shantytowns.

Fears were raised over their wellbeing last month when another child star, Rubina Ali, 9, was allegedly offered for sale by her slumdweller father for £200,000. The father denied the story and police said that they found no evidence against him.

Slumdog was made for £15 million and went on to gross £225 million at the box office. The leading child actors are thought to have been paid about £2,000 each, but Christian Colson and Danny Boyle, the British producer and director, have denied being unfair.

Azharuddin and Rubina were found places in a school — the first they had attended — that specialises in educating disadvantaged children. If they remain in school until they are 18 they will receive a “significant lump-sum”. The families are also given a fixed monthly amount towards living expenses. The filmmakers have also pledged to buy the children houses, as has a local Mumbai politician — promises yet to be fulfilled.

Azharuddin’s shack had been bulldozed before, while Slumdog was in production. Boyle has described how on that occasion the filmmakers sent a search party for the boy and found him asleep on top of a car.

People close to the situation said that the filmmakers then gave Azharuddin’s father money for a new home, which he received but was cheated out of by a cowboy builder.

“[The authorities] didn’t give prior notice. We didn't even get a chance to take out our belongings,” Shameem Ismail, Azharuddin’s mother, said yesterday. She has been living in the slum for 15 years but has no legal claim to the land.

“I don’t know what I am going to do,” Mrs Ismail added, sitting on a bed that she saved from the wreckage of the bivouac in which the family has lived for months.

India’s slums fall into two categories. Registered slums can include decent, if tiny, homes with some amenities. Azharuddin's family lives in an unregistered slum, where the dwelling places look like the type of dens British children might build to play in.

His shack is on the fringe of Garib Nagar, a stretch of ramshackle lean-tos, open sewers and tarpaulin-covered dwellings in Mumbai’s Bandra suburb — an area that is also home to the lavish villas of several Bollywood stars.

The authorities said that only illegally built shacks and no legally owned houses had been damaged. Such demolition drives are common in Mumbai, where more than half the city’s population of about 18 million lives in slums.

Officals said that they had orders to clear all hutments near a storm drain in Bandra. The Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai said: “It may have happened that these celebrity children’s homes also fell in this category, but we have to follow orders.”

A spokesman for the Jai Ho Trust set up by Boyle and Colson to look after the child stars, said they had offered Azharuddin’s family a flat to stay in last week, but the family refused it because it would have been rented by the film-makers. The family is demanding to be given a flat.

The Jai Ho spokesman said that would take some time to arrange. A Jai Ho representative said that one of its counsellors was monitoring the situation, but the family was likely to arrange “transit accommodation” for itself.

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