The government has directed all the community schools across the country not to provide junk food to students for their mid-day meals.

The Centre for Education and Human Resource Development, Sanothimi, on Monday released a manual on school mid-day meal management with a provision to restrict the use of junk food at schools.

The Centre has published the manual by including 60 types of food items with priority to the locally available foods as the mid-day meal to the students.

As stated, the government has already released Rs 7.72 billion to the schools to support the mid-day meal programme. Under this programme, a total of 2.94 million students across the country have been provided with a mid-day meal for free at schools.