London, Dec. 8 : Stephen Mills, a writer and film-maker who has spent over two decades watching tigers and other big cats in the wild, believes initiatives by the Indian government, and growing awareness by local people in tiger areas of the need to conserve the animals, offer new grounds for optimism in what has been a remorseless decline over the past 40 years.

There may now be as few as 4,000 tigers left in the wild from a world population estimated at 100,000 a century ago.