Star of Oscar-winning documentary Smile Pinki, now 20, struggles with poverty: Report

Megan Mylan's Oscar-winning documentary Smile Pinki focused on a girl named Pinki, as the title suggests, who was born with a cleft lip or a cleft palate, a condition that affects tens of thousands of children born in India every year. In 2009, the documentary bagged an Oscar in the documentary (short) category. At the time, the young girl was just 6 years old when she attended the prestigious award ceremony along with her father. Today, she is 20 and is still living in the same village.

Now a 12th-class student, she and her family have several pressing issues ahead of them and are least concerned about their past encounter with fame. Her family has now grown to six members and is currently struggling to make ends meet, said a report in Hindustan Times newspaper.

Pinki's father Sonkar still sells vegetables from his cart and he has to work really hard to fulfil their basic needs. To fetch water daily, her family has to walk over 100 metres to a well. Even the school where she is enrolled, SRVS Inter College in Ahiraura, is 9km from her village.

"My father has to work very hard to fulfil our basic needs. He has very little land. Selling seasonal fruits and vegetables is his only source of income,"Hindustan Times quoted Pinki as saying. "See, the condition of my house. We have just two small rooms, one without a door."

Sonkar added, "After returning from America, life became the same again. I restarted selling seasonal fruits to meet the expenses of my family."

When asked about her Oscar experience, Pink said, "I don’t remember much. What I can recall though is that I was honoured by the Smile Train team and the documentary film director. She thanked me. I was given a trophy. I treasure it very much. This trophy is a symbol of the fact that we went to America and participated in the Oscar award ceremony. Many prominent people were present there. The ceremony was very grand."

Pinki received a free corrective cleft lip surgery from Varanasi-based plastic surgeon Subodh Kumar Singh, who is associated with Smile Train India, a charity that works exclusively in the area of cleft lips and palates. The documentary, which was about the little girl getting the treatment as part of a charity, took her to Los Angeles, and then, four years later, to London.

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