Giving Compass' Take:

• On News Deeply, Kamala Damor tells her story about working with women and girls in India, helping them access their right to property and inheritance.

• Land rights can help empower women in many rural areas around the world. What can we do to support the work of Damor and others in this field?

• Here's what we can do to protect indigenous peoples’ land rights in general.

On Mondays, I leave home at 9 a.m. so I can be in Meghraj town by 10, when the land awareness and legal literacy center where I work, Swa Bhoomi Kendra, opens.

I call it a center, but it’s a makeshift arrangement for now. I sit with my colleague, Sister Amti, at a large table in the corridor outside a local government official’s room in the panchayat (town council) compound. Amti has been doing this for a year, while I’ve been at it for five. It’s inconvenient and very noisy working in the corridor, but a new building is under construction and next year, we’ll have a nice office with privacy.

As a paralegal worker, I do field work and education outreach three days a week, and I spend the other two doing administrative work, counseling and advocacy. When I’m at the center, I assist women who come to us with questions and problems relating to exercising their land rights.

Today, in the first hour, we had seven walk-ins. Five women needed information on getting government aid for agricultural subsidies and organic fertilizers. Together with Sister Amti, I talked them through what they needed to do and gave them the forms they need to fill in, along with advice about what documents they must bring to get the benefits.

Two of the women needed to have their names added to their village land records; both are widows and we needed to hand in death certificates for their husbands as well as a family tree to prove their right over their property.

Read the full article about land rights activism in rural India by Chhavi Sachdev at News Deeply.