Quarrying and all similar non-forest activities, identified as highly dangerous to environment, were banned following enactment of the Forest Conservation Act, which the Supreme Court made more stringent in 1996 after it defined forest "as any natural assemblage of trees".

According to sources, a proposal in this regard was finalised at a recent meeting of the Forest Advisory Committee and was submitted to an expert panel of the Central Government empowered to grant such relaxations.

Citing that quarrying was being carried out in areas without any vegetational support, the Government has expressed its willingness to carry out compensatory afforestation in lieu of forest areas which would be affected by quarrying.

The advisory panel, comprising chief conservator of the Ministry of Forest's RegionalCentre at Bangalore, forest nodal officer, representative of the Forest Secretary and State's top forest officials, said the compensatory afforestation will be carried out in degraded forest areas which will be identified by the respective divisions.

Ever since the Government stopped quarrying in forest areas, there was severe political pressure to restart the operations as it enabled trading in high-quality stone at prices much lower than the prevailing market rate.

When the cost of 1 cubic metre of rock was fixed at Rs 85, the same quantity was priced twice this amount in the open market.

However, a highly placed Government official has termed the move as an attempt to camouflage a protracted legal complication following Government sanction to quarrying given in 1997 after seeking the opinion of the Advocate-General.

The Advocate-General had advised the Government that it could show green flag to the operation as all existing quarries were issued licences before 1980 and hence the Act was notapplicable to them. Following this, quarrying in all forest areas began once again in full swing and continued for five months.

However, this was brought to a sudden halt by the Forest Secretary who understood that this could amount to contempt of court.

Following this, the Government decided to seek a formal permission "like many other States which have managed to get special sanction" for carrying out such activities, a top officer said.

Meanwhile, several forest officers have expressed apprehension over the move as "it would once again result in uncontrollable activities within a protected forest area".

As such, the Forest Department was finding it tough to handle quarrying operations as they could not monitor the whole gamut of activities with the skeletal infrastructure.

One of the accompanying illegal activity was the smuggling out of more than the allotted quantity of stone.

"Without strengthening the force, there is no way we can check these activities," said an official, adding that theGovernment should have looked into such aspects before seeking formal permission from the Centre.