Burning bright: one girl's hopes for the tiger

A young British girl met the Prime Minister of India yesterday, and made a personal plea to help save the tiger from extinction.

Jenny Osgood, from Newquay, Cornwall, presented I K Gujral with a petition she had organised, at a meeting in New Delhi. Jenny was in Delhi as part of a trip organised by the British Environmental Investigation Agency animal protection charity, in co-operation with Indian organisations. The petition, which Jenny, 16, collected in her local area after seeing EIA work on the plight of the Indian tiger, contains 7,000 signatures - one for each tiger left in the wild today. Jenny, who is visiting India with her mother and is taking part in Indian wildlife week during which she will travel to a tiger reserve, said: "I hope very much that other young people will get involved in the campaign and that my visit will show that young people care about this issue. If enough people care and act on that caring then we can save the tiger."

Almost two-thirds of the world's remaining tiger population - which in 1900 stood at about 80,000 - is in India, where at least one is poached every day.