Being poor is like trying to climb out of a pit while roped together with your family. At the bottom of the pit — below the international poverty line of $1.90 per person a day — the water is filthy, there’s very little food and hardly any medical care.
For the first few levels the family climbs, there are no safety nets. A single shock — granny needing costly medicine, the failure of the family farm or the death of the breadwinner — can throw everybody back into the pit.
From about 1990, ever more families acquired a safety net. That might be bank savings, a sibling in New Delhi or New York sending money home or a state clinic providing free basic healthcare. They were crossing the great human divide that separates the defenceless from the protected.