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New Delhi | Mumbai: India and China may commence discussions shortly on a trade package covering supplies of critical rare earth magnets, fertilisers and pharmaceuticals, said people with knowledge of the matter. This would signal a thaw in relations with the neighbour amid heightening tensions with the US and the clamour from Indian industry to expedite imports of essential inputs from China.

Consultations between representatives of the two countries are likely to take place later this month, around the time of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit for the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) summit, scheduled to be held in Tianjin from August 31 to September 1, the people said. “The top three items on the agenda for discussion are rare earth magnets, fertilisers and pharmaceuticals,” a senior official told ET.

While outreach has begun, supplies of rare earth magnets and all fertilisers are yet to resume from China.
India mandates government approval for investment by countries that have a border with it, a measure specifically aimed at its northern neighbour. That’s against the backdrop of an escalation in tensions over the past five years, including border skirmishes and China’s support for Pakistan.

China announced export controls on medium and heavy rare earth-related items on April 4, with a view to “safeguarding national security” in response to US President Donald Trump’s tariffs, citing end-use norms. Possible talks with Beijing assume significance in light of the 50% tariff that Trump has imposed on Indian exports.

The US has deferred tariffs on China by 90 days. Rare earth magnets are essential for a wide range of products, but especially for electric vehicles. While China has resumed shipments of rare earth magnets to companies in the US, Europe and Southeast Asia, export licences are yet to be issued to vendors supplying to India. “Individual clearances for importing these items have not come so far,” said one of the persons. “Negotiations will now start between the two countries for a trade package.” Beijing had also halted shipments of urea and some other fertilisers to India in the last three months. It has begun the process of easing restrictions on supplies of just urea to the country. “Tenders for import of urea from China have been floated,” said a top executive of a fertiliser company. This indicates China is agreeable to sending some amount of the fertiliser to India.

State trading enterprises, which import urea from China on behalf of the Indian government, have started floating tenders for the import of a limited quantity of the crop nutrient. While there is no talk about specialty fertilisers, discussions are likely going ahead, people aware of developments said.

China had also stopped shipments of specialty fertilisers such as calcium nitrate and mono ammonium phosphate. India imports about 80% of these chemicals from China.

A global supplier of agricultural inputs, Beijing has, however, been exporting them to other countries.

LOOKING AHEAD
Meanwhile, both India and China are concerned about the looming trade imbalance in pharmaceuticals.

Trump’s proposed tariff on finished drugs — 250% over the next one and a half years — stands to disrupt the industry in both countries.

The commerce ministry has called for a meeting ahead of the SCO summit with top representatives from the pharmaceutical industry to discuss, among other issues, ways to collaborate and strengthen ties with China as part of broader cooperation.

Industry watchers told ET the contours of the discussions have not been disclosed yet, but these may include mitigation plans against the backdrop of US tariffs.

“While pharmaceutical exports from India have been thus far exempt from the 50% US tariffs, future risks cannot be ruled out,” an industry expert told ET.

(Web Desk) – A new study finds that even kids as young as three can tell whether a short, wordless music tune sounds happy, sad, calm, or scary – and they get better at it as they grow.

The researchers also looked at how certain personality traits, like low empathy or limited emotional expression, might affect this skill.

The findings reveal that, while most preschoolers have a natural ear for musical emotions, some patterns make certain feelings harder to recognize.

Kids match music to moods

Rebecca Waller and colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Arts and Sciences tested 144 preschoolers using five-second instrumental clips and a forced-choice task that asked them to match each clip to one of four emotion faces.

The design let the team separate two basic emotion dimensions, valence and arousal. Valence ranges from positive to negative, while arousal reflects low to high energy in the music.

Performance was better than chance: overall accuracy was 36 percent compared with a 25 percent chance level on the four-option task, and the age trend favored older preschoolers.

High-energy emotions were easier to recognize. Recognition was higher for clips conveying high-arousal states, such as happiness and fear, than for low-arousal states, such as calmness and sadness.

Kids with emotion-reading difficulties

Children rated higher on callous-unemotional traits showed poorer recognition overall, with the clearest drop in positive, low-arousal music. Fear recognition, by contrast, did not differ in these children.

This pattern aligns with previous work which links callous traits to broader emotion-reading difficulties. These include problems recognizing distress in faces, as well as a higher risk for aggression and rule-breaking in youth.

In Western tonal music, mode and harmony often carry affective color. A major key is usually judged as brighter or happier, while minor often lands as darker, though cultural context shapes these mappings.

In the new data, children were more accurate when clips were in a major key, while tempo showed no main effect on accuracy in this sample, consistent with the broader finding that high-arousal cues drive performance at these ages.

Musical emotion is important

By the early school years, kids typically get better at mapping music to emotion categories – a trend documented across ages five, eight, and eleven in earlier lab studies using unfamiliar excerpts.

Because callous-unemotional traits carry elevated risk for externalizing problems, any channel that strengthens emotion knowledge could be useful in prevention or early support.

Family and culture shape listening

Early exposure to varied musical styles could help strengthen a kid’s ability to recognize emotions in music. Familiarity with a range of tempos, keys, and cultural traditions may broaden the cues they can pick up on, potentially improving accuracy beyond what age alone predicts.

Environmental factors such as family listening habits, preschool music programs, or even background music in public spaces might contribute to these abilities.

This opens the possibility that targeted musical activities in early childhood settings could have lasting effects on social-emotional learning.

Even very short, lyric-free clips can communicate basic feelings to preschoolers, which suggests simple listening tasks may be informative in classrooms and clinics.

Other recent work finds that five-year-olds can sort musical feelings along valence and intensity, hinting at a fast-maturing sense for emotional contours in sound.

Empathy and musical connections

Music does not only communicate emotion, it can elicit it. In one study of five- to six-year-olds, above-chance recognition coexisted with stronger felt responses among kids whose parents reported higher empathy, especially for sad music.

Beyond individuals, coordinated musical activity has been tied to social bonding through interpersonal synchrony and endorphin release in group contexts such as singing or dancing.

“We show that children are good at matching emotion faces to the ‘correct’ emotion music, even at age three,” said Waller.