A former chemical-industry executive who fought against stronger regulations under the first Trump administration is returning to take a critical role at the Environmental Protection Agency, two people with knowledge of the appointment said, raising concerns of corporate influence on chemical safety regulations.

Nancy B. Beck, a toxicologist and former executive at the American Chemistry Council, the industry’s main trade group, is set to reprise a role helping to oversee chemical policy similar to the one she held from 2017 to 2021, though her exact title and scope of work has yet to be determined, the people said. The chemistry council represents dozens of chemical companies and major manufacturers.

Dr. Beck is credited with leading a wide-ranging pushback against chemical regulations during the first Trump administration, as well as what a subsequent internal investigation described as political interference in agency science and policymaking. She rewrote rules, for example, that made it harder to track the health consequences of a “forever chemical” linked to cancer, and therefore to regulate it.

She also helped scale back proposed bans on other substances like asbestos and methylene chloride, a harmful chemical found in paint thinners. Neither the E.P.A. nor Dr. Beck responded to requests for comment for this article.

Hunton Andrews Kurth, the law firm where Dr. Beck served most recently as director of regulatory science, said she was no longer with the firm. Dr. Beck is listed in the E.P.A. staff directory as a political appointee.

Dr. Beck is expected to be joined by Lynn Ann Dekleva, who also worked for the American Chemistry Council, who is set to return to a role helping to oversee new chemicals as deputy assistant administrator, though her title could still change, the people said. An environmental engineer by training, her career in the chemicals industry includes more than three decades at DuPont, the chemicals giant.

Recent reports released by the E.P.A.’s Office of Inspector General said that, under Dr. Dekleva, employees were pushed to approve new chemicals based on less stringent assessments and were retaliated against if they raised concerns.

Dr. Dekleva did not respond to requests for comment.

Chris Jahn, chief executive of the American Chemistry Council, said in a statement that the group looked forward “to working with all EPA staff in support of sound science” and policy to strengthen America’s competitiveness and create jobs.

The appointments of Dr. Beck and Dr. Dekleva to advisory or deputy jobs at the agency are not expected to require approval by Congress. Dr. Beck was previously nominated to head the Consumer Product Safety Commission in 2020, but did not get to a Congressional vote after Democrats and environmental groups accused her of using her previous government positions to advance the chemical industry’s agenda.

“Nancy Beck, E.P.A.’s ‘toxics czar’ during the first Trump Administration, is back to fulfill the chemical industry’s wish list,” said Daniel Rosenberg, director of federal toxics policy at the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental advocacy group. “The weakening of health protections” from toxic chemicals “is just around the corner,” he said.

Over the past four years the Biden administration has tried to catch up on regulating the most dangerous chemicals on the market, as required under a law that was strengthened in 2016.

The Biden administration proposed or finalized restrictions on 10 dangerous chemicals, including trichloroethylene, a chemical used in cleaners and lubricants also linked to cancer, as well as asbestos, a heat- and fire-resistant mineral widely used in building materials that can cause cancer and lung disease. Currently, more than 80,000 chemicals on the market are not subject to environmental testing or regulation.

The Biden administration also set the first-ever federal standards for PFAS in drinking water, and designated two types of PFAS as hazardous substances under a law that shifts the responsibility for the cleanup of toxic sites from taxpayers to industry.

The chemicals industry has asked the Trump administration to roll back many of those rules. In a letter to Mr. Trump last month, a coalition of industry groups, including the chemistry council, called for a reversal of what they called the Biden administration’s “unscientific, sledgehammer approach” to chemical policy.

In the letter, the industry groups in particular ask the Trump administration to revisit PFAS drinking-water standards and the designation of the two PFAS chemicals as hazardous. They also press the E.P.A. to speed up its review of new chemicals, and to roll back its effort to place new regulations on existing chemicals, something chemical companies said was causing “confusion, duplication and overregulation.”

Israel’s military continued what it called a new counterterrorism operation in the Israeli-occupied West Bank on Wednesday, arresting at least 25 people over the last day, Palestinian news media reported.

The total death toll since the start of the raid rose to 10, up from eight on Tuesday, and four more people were injured in Jenin, according to Palestinian officials cited by Wafa, the Palestinian Authority’s official news agency.

The Israeli offensive, in its second day, was not just focused on Jenin.

On Wednesday, the military made arrests in Jenin, Ramallah, Hebron, Tulkarm and Bethlehem, the officials said. Enhanced security at Israeli checkpoints across the territory slowed or stopped traffic; in one case a 45-year-old woman died at a checkpoint outside Hebron while waiting to be allowed to go to a hospital, the Palestinian Health Ministry said.

The mayor of Jenin, Mohammad Jarar, told Wafa that Israeli forces held as many as 600 people overnight at the Jenin Governmental Hospital, but they were allowed to leave Wednesday morning. The news agency described Israeli bulldozers blocking the hospital’s doors with dirt from nearby streets.

Mr. Jarar also said people had been forced to leave their homes, a claim that Lt. Col. Nadav Shoshani, an Israeli military spokesman, denied. “There’s no evacuation order in Jenin,” he said.

Briefing reporters about the operation, Colonel Shoshani said people at the hospital were held temporarily to ensure they were not hurt by explosives that the military was detonating nearby.

Since a temporary cease-fire took hold in Gaza over the weekend, Israel has turned its attention to the West Bank, where tensions have risen as militants have grown in power and Israeli settler violence against Palestinian civilians has soared.

Colonel Shoshani said the operation in the West Bank was similar in scope to one that the military carried out in August. That 10-day raid in Jenin killed 21 people, according to Palestinian news media and residents. It was one of the most extensive and deadly raids in the West Bank in years.

The colonel said the operation was Israel’s latest effort to curb militant attacks, many of which involved improvised explosives that had been planted under both civilian streets and Israeli military vehicles.

“Our strategy is to fight those terrorists while we enable the civilian population to go on with their lives,” Colonel Shoshani said.

In a series of social media posts on Wednesday, Roland Friedrich, the West Bank director of the United Nations agency that helps Palestinians, said the Israeli operation was “expected to last days” and was using advanced weapons on Jenin, including with airstrikes.

President Trump’s executive order designating Mexican cartels and other criminal organizations as foreign terrorists could force some American companies to forgo doing business in Mexico rather than risk U.S. sanctions, according to former government officials and analysts — an outcome that could have a major effect on both countries given their deep economic interdependence.

The executive order, which Mr. Trump signed on Monday, is intended to apply maximum pressure on Mexico to rein in its dangerous drug trade. The designation, more generally, also gives his administration more power to impose economic penalties and travel restrictions, and potentially even to take military action in foreign countries.

Yet, disentangling cartel operations from U.S. interests in Mexico could be immensely complicated. Mexico is the United States’ largest trade partner of goods, and many American companies have manufacturing operations there.

Even more complicated, these criminal networks have extended their operations far beyond drug trafficking and human smuggling. They are now embedded in a wide swath of the legal economy, from avocado farming to the country’s billion-dollar tourism industry, making it hard to be absolutely sure that American companies are isolated from cartel activities.

“This has come up in previous administrations across the political spectrum and from members of Congress who have wanted to do it,” said Samantha Sultoon, a senior adviser on sanctions policy and threat finance in the Trump and Biden administrations.

“But no one has done it because they have looked at what the implications would be on trade, economic and financial relationships between Mexico and the United States,” she added. “They have all come away thinking that such a designation would actually be super shortsighted and ill-considered, though prior administrations viewed the U.S.-Mexico relationship far differently than the incoming Trump administration appears to.”

The foreign terrorist designation could lead to severe penalties — including substantial fines, asset seizures and criminal charges — on companies and individuals found to be paying ransom or extortion payments. U.S. companies could also be ensnared by standard payments made to Mexican companies that a cartel controls without the American companies’ knowledge.

Some extortion payments, even if made under duress, could be considered “material support” to cartels, said Pablo Zárate, senior manager director at FTI Consulting, an American firm that released a report laying out some of the risks of the terrorist designation.

Former U.S. officials and analysts pointed out that it would be nearly impossible to identify which business may employ or be affiliated with cartel members given the tens of thousands of people involved and operating in various industries, including the hotel and agriculture sectors. Cartels use the legal economy to launder money, which could mean that unwitting employees working at a resort or an avocado packing company could technically be on the cartel payroll but not know it.

As a result, companies in the risk-averse American financial sector may simply refuse to wire money to a Mexican factory, for example, to facilitate cross-border production and trade, or to wire money between personal accounts.

“Banks may turn away customers, because they may not think they are worth the risk if they have links to Mexico,” said Eric Jacobstein, a former State Department official in the Biden administration.

Banks could ultimately decide to avoid entire sectors perceived as high risk, said Fabian Teichmann, a Swiss lawyer and expert on terrorist financing. Mr. Teichmann singled out Mexico’s avocado trade, where cartels have drastically expanded their operations, as one area that could come under greater scrutiny.

“Banks might say, ‘We don’t want to be anywhere close to those who are considered to be terrorists, so we want to avoid that risk,’” Mr. Teichmann said. “From a banking perspective, that will be a very reasonable decision.”

Other types of financial institutions that facilitate payments between the United States and Mexico could also be affected, such as Venmo or PayPal, which Mr. Trump’s close confidante Elon Musk helped found.

The terrorist label could also push big parts of Mexico’s economy further into the shadows, where cash is used instead of electronically traceable transactions, making it harder for investigators to examine the cartels’ financial structures, Mr. Teichmann said.

“If people can’t bank legitimately, they escape to so-called underground banking systems,” Mr. Teichmann said.

In 2024, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce surveyed 218 companies and found that 12 percent of respondents said that “organized crime has taken partial control of the sales, distribution and/or pricing of their goods.”

The multinational banana producer Chiquita Brands was found liable in 2024 for killings by a Colombian right-wing paramilitary group that was designated as a terrorist organization. Chiquita Brands said that it had been extorted by the paramilitary group and forced to make payments to protect its Colombian employees. Plaintiffs, however, argued that the company had paid the paramilitary group to run out residents to buy land at depressed values.

The terrorist designation would also hurt American companies that are firmly north of the border but rely on Mexican labor. The designation is so broad and vague that ranches in Texas or farms in California could be swept up by the penalties if their employees send remittances to family members in Mexico who are involved in organized crime.

If money transfer companies like Western Union also stop transactions to Mexico over worries about properly vetting Mexican clients, it could affect the remittances the country relies on. That would be devastating for the Mexican economy, which received $63.3 billion in remittances in 2023, nearly 5 percent of the country’s gross domestic product.

The foreign terrorist designation could also pave the way for the United States to deploy forces inside Mexico against criminal organizations without the Mexican government’s consent, as it did in Afghanistan and Syria.

But Afghanistan was occupied by the United States, and Syria’s government lost control over much of its territory in recent years. That gave Washington some cover under international law for the American military to deploy troops and launch special-forces operations to kill or capture terrorist leaders in those countries.

Mexico, however, has built up cooperation with the United States for over 30 years to counter the cartels. Mexico could threaten to halt cooperation if the United States is seen to be violating Mexico’s sovereignty. When the U.S. federal prosecutors office arrested Mexico’s former defense secretary during Mr. Trump’s first administration, the Mexican government halted all cooperation with the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration.

“Unilateral action would be catastrophic,” said Craig Deare, a former U.S. military attaché at the U.S. Embassy in Mexico in the 1990s.

“It would dismantle any collaboration and decades of Republican and Democratic efforts to build a defense relationship with Mexico,” he said, adding, “If you don’t like cooperation now, wait until Mexico cuts all ties.”

On Tuesday, President Claudia Sheinbaum of Mexico issued a stern warning to Mr. Trump during her daily news conference. “We will always defend our sovereignty,” Ms. Sheinbaum said. “We all want to fight the drug cartels, that is obvious. So what should we do? We have to coordinate efforts; we have to collaborate,” she said.

“May they know that the president of the republic will always defend Mexico above all else,” the Mexican president added.

The 613 men had traveled from their native Niger to neighboring Libya, where many of them planned to reach Europe over the Mediterranean Sea, a journey thousands of people from sub-Saharan Africa endeavor to make every year.

But late last month, the men were deported by Libyan authorities in one of the country’s largest expulsions in years. The mass deportation is part of a common pattern: North African governments, funded by the European Union to tackle migration, using brutal tactics to block sub-Saharan Africa migrants from heading to Europe.

The 613 men reached Niger’s closest town to the Libyan border on Jan. 3, disheveled and hungry, some barefoot and sick after months of detention and days of travel across the Sahara. Two of the men died shortly after arriving in Niger.

“I lived through hell,” said Salmana Issoufou, one of the men. Mr. Issoufou, 18, said he had been beaten by Libyan prison guards with wires and weapons throughout his eight-month detention.

As anti-migrant sentiment rises across Europe, from France to Germany to Hungary, the citizens of sub-Saharan Africa trying to reach the continent are being pushed back by North African governments in proportions unseen in years. The E.U. has signed bilateral agreements with Tunisia, Morocco, Libya, Mauritania, that include financial support to curb migrant flows.

The strategy appears to be working: illegal border crossings dropped sharply in 2024, according to recent data from the European Union’s border agency, Frontex.

But rights groups say the methods being used to keep sub-Saharan migrants from traveling to Europe include well-documented human rights violations, such as so-called desert dumps. Migrants have been abandoned in the Sahara without food or water, or kept in North African prisons where they face torture, sexual violence and starvation.

Since Tunisia struck a deal with the European Union in 2023, it has dumped more than 12,000 people, including children and pregnant women, into deserted areas of Libya, according to the United Nations. Last year, the E.U. signed a similar deal with Mauritania.

In Libya, the European Union has financed the country’s coast guard, which has been accused of firing live ammunition during interceptions at sea and of handing migrants over to violent militias.

An investigation by a consortium of news outlets last year showed that vehicles and intelligence provided by E.U. countries have been used by North African security forces to arrest migrants or transport them to desert areas.

The 613 men who were sent back to Niger this month were detained in Libya since at least last fall, according to regional officials in Niger, who escorted them from the border to Dirkou, a Nigerien town about 260 miles south of Libya.

Two men died in Dirkou, according to Abba Tchéké, a social worker who assisted the men there and who works for Alarm Phone Sahara, a nonprofit that rescues stranded migrants in the desert.

The men reached Agadez, the largest city in Niger’s north and a major transit hub for migrants, last week. They were exhausted and dehydrated, and some had skin lesions and broken limbs. Half a dozen men who were deported all said in interviews with The New York Times that they had been mistreated by the Libyan authorities.

Adamou Harouna, 36, said prison guards had burned plastic on him while he was being held.

The mass deportation from Libya echoes similar movements from Algeria, which shares a 580-mile-long border with Niger and last year deported more than 31,000 people, the highest figure in years, according to Alarm Phone Sahara.

The Algerian authorities drop migrants at the border with Niger, forcing them to walk for hours in the desert before reaching the closest town. The migrants also face beatings and physical violence in Algerian prisons. (The European Union doesn’t have a migration agreement with Algeria.)

While expulsions from Libya to Niger have thus far been lower than from Algeria, the recent mass deportation has raised concerns about a potential increase. Last year, hundreds of African citizens were forcibly returned from Libya to Chad, Egypt, Sudan and Tunisia, according to the United Nations.

In Africa, deported migrants are returned to their home countries by the United Nations’ International Organization for Migration. In Niger, the organization transports people abandoned in border areas back to Agadez and later to their home countries on planes that depart several times a week.

For the Nigerien men, the organization arranged buses. Mr. Issoufou, 18, said he would remain in Niger. Mr. Harouna said he plans to travel back to Libya as soon as possible.

Ibrahim Manzo Diallo contributed reporting from Niamey, Niger, Saikou Jammeh from Dakar, Senegal, and Jenny Gross from London.

The Trump administration intends to push to renegotiate the U.S. trade deal with Canada and Mexico ahead of a required 2026 review of it, seeking to shore up U.S. auto jobs and counter Chinese firms that are making inroads into the Mexican auto sector, people familiar with the deliberations said.

The U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement, which Mr. Trump signed in 2020, required the three countries to hold a “joint review” of the deal after six years, on July 1, 2026. But Mr. Trump intends to begin those negotiations sooner, according to the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss plans that had not been made public.

Trump officials particularly want to tighten the pact’s rules governing the auto sector, to try to discourage auto factories from leaving the United States, they said. They are also seeking to block Chinese companies making cars and auto parts from being able to export to the United States through factories in Mexico.

Mr. Trump has also threatened to impose a 25 percent tariff on products from Canada and Mexico, saying those countries are allowing drugs and migrants to flow across American borders. Speaking from the Oval Office on Monday night after his inauguration, he said he planned to move forward with the tariffs on Feb. 1.

Members of the Trump team believe that Mexico has been violating the terms of a separate agreement to limit metal exports to the United States, and they are eager to show the Mexican government that they mean to take action against such trade violations, one person familiar with the conversations said.

The Wall Street Journal earlier reported that Mr. Trump was pushing for an early renegotiation of his North American trade deal. The three countries are required to meet to discuss the terms of the trade deal six years after the agreement went into force, but trade experts have expected the Trump team to speed up work on the issue.

Mexico and Canada had initially insisted on having six years elapse before the terms of the deal would be revisited because they thought that would get them through a second consecutive Trump administration, a person familiar with the negotiation said. Instead, the requirement for talks in 2026 will fall squarely in Mr. Trump’s lap.

Mr. Trump has long criticized the previous trade deal, the North American Free Trade Agreement, and his officials negotiated their new deal to replace and update it. One of the pact’s major changes was raising the threshold of a vehicle’s content that needed to be produced in North America to qualify for zero tariffs. The deal also included other provisions requiring carmakers to use more North American metal and higher-paid workers.

But Mr. Trump and his advisers now think those terms have not been restrictive enough to prevent car manufacturers from moving factories outside the United States. They have also been wary of a surge in Mexican imports of cheap and high-quality Chinese vehicles, as well as Chinese efforts to set up auto factories in Mexico.

Speaking at the Detroit Economic Club in October, Mr. Trump said that “Mexico is becoming the second China.”

“When China comes in, they take over everything, and you’d have no car manufacturing anymore,” he added.

People familiar with the plans cautioned that they could still change. It also remains to be seen whether Mr. Trump is threatening tariffs against Canada and Mexico as a negotiating tactic to extract certain concessions from their governments, or would simply impose them outright. The Trump administration’s press office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Mr. Trump signed an executive order on Monday evening directing various agencies to study a wide variety of trade issues. He did not immediately impose any new tariffs, as he had threatened previously, but the order teed up the possibility of a host of trade actions in the months to come.

One provision in the order directed trade officials to assess the impact of the North American trade deal on workers, farmers and other businesses and “make recommendations regarding the United States’ participation in the agreement.” It also directed them to begin soliciting public comments in preparation for the July 2026 review of the trade deal.

Bimla Bissell, the indispensable and well-connected social secretary to four American ambassadors to India who was a kind of unofficial ambassador herself, a shrewd local guide to the culture and complexities of a sprawling country, died on Jan. 9 at her home in Delhi. She was 92.

The cause was complications of diabetes, her daughter, Monsoon Bissell, said.

Ms. Bissell’s first ambassadorial boss was John Kenneth Galbraith, the erudite liberal economist who forged a deep bond with Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru of India. He was followed by Chester Bowles, the adman turned civil rights champion.

Both were appointees of John F. Kennedy, and it was Ms. Bissell’s job to organize, among many complicated diplomatic extravaganzas, Jacqueline Kennedy’s nine-day trip to India in 1962, an event breathlessly covered by the global press. “Mrs. Kennedy Gets a Festive Welcome on Arrival in India” read the front-page headline in The New York Times when first lady landed, accompanied by her sister, Lee Radziwill.

It also fell to Ms. Bissell to gently let Ms. Kennedy know that the gifts she had brought her Indian hosts — leather picture frames stamped with the words “100% American Beef” — would not be appropriate.

When Richard Celeste was hired to be Mr. Bowles’s personal assistant and embassy protocol officer in 1963, he was flummoxed by the latter job description. So Ms. Bissell took him in hand.

“She took charge of my education with ease and grace,” said Mr. Celeste, who would go on to be a director of the Peace Corps, governor of Ohio and President Bill Clinton’s envoy to India. She also scooped him up for dinner every night until his wife arrived with their newborn.

By all accounts, Ms. Bissell was a one-woman social network, a deft saloniste who seemed to know everybody of any significance in every field.

She was discreet and diplomatic, friends and associates said. She was curious, game and gregarious. She read 14 newspapers every morning. She was politically astute, and in her later years she could often predict a local election down to the number of votes. She had a preternatural capacity for empathy and friendship, and for nurturing and maintaining those friendships.

She counted among her admirers — and they were legion — heads of state, diplomats, policymakers, NGO leaders, journalists, movie directors, authors, artisans, artists and students, all of whom she collected for lavish lunches and dinners at her sprawling stucco house in a leafy development in South Delhi, which was chockablock with crafts and textiles, art and antiques.

She and her husband, John Bissell, were a Delhi institution. He was a lanky, Connecticut-born Yale graduate who in 1958 had traveled to India on a Ford Foundation grant and never left, having fallen in love with the country and his future wife. He founded a company to export Indian crafts, and then a school to educate artisans.

Their household was a kind of North Star, said Marie Brenner, one of many journalists whom Ms. Bissell drew into her circle. Others called it Grand Central East for its open-door policy. “It was always filled with remarkable people,” Ms. Brenner said. “The operating energy was this very high level of political and intellectual discourse.”

Mr. Celeste said: “John was the dreamer and Bim was the doer. She was extremely well-informed, and her instincts were extremely well-grounded.”

At a certain point, Mr. Celeste realized that Ms. Bissell was juggling two jobs. In the mid-1950s she had founded the Playhouse, Delhi’s first progressive preschool, which would become a launchpad for generations of Indians and expat children.

“Over time I came to appreciate that Playhouse School served as a magnet for hard-working, aspirational Indian families,” Mr. Celeste said. “Bim was building a dynamic set of relationships that, as social secretary, gave her a unique Rolodex.”

Senator Michael Bennet of Colorado, a family friend, described Ms. Bissell as an “extraordinary citizen-diplomat for India.” (He was born in India; his father, Douglas Bennet, was also an aide to Ambassador Bowles.)

He added, in an email, “For the generations of newcomers she welcomed to Delhi — especially young people, whom she loved and would enchant with stories from her remarkable life — she was a guiding light.”

Bimla Nanda, known as Bim, was born Oct. 12, 1932, in Quetta, now part of Pakistan. She was the eldest of three daughters of Sita (Sibal) Nanda and Pran Nath Nanda, a veterinary surgeon who became the first husbandry commissioner of independent India. He was also a table tennis champion who invented a unique way to hold the paddle, which became known as the “Nanda grip,” according to Ms. Bissell.

Bim grew up in Lahore, in the Punjab region, until just after Partition, in 1947, when the family moved to Delhi. She majored in English at the Miranda House College for Women, at the University of Delhi.

Her first marriage, an arranged match with a government aide from a suitable family, was brief and unhappy. Divorce at that time was unthinkable, but Bim left her husband, and India, for the University of Michigan, where she earned a master’s degree in education in 1958. When she returned home, she was ostracized, barred from the local gymkhana, the social club that was a leftover from the Raj.

“She broke all the conventions,” said her daughter, “but she did it without trying to make a point. She did it because this was the life she needed to live.”

Bim Nanda was working for a government organization promoting traditional crafts when Mr. Bissell arrived on his Ford Foundation grant. He was instantly smitten with her; she thought he was smitten with her country. In any case, they became fast friends while Mr. Bissell wooed her with fervor and great discipline. For the next five years, as she would tell it, he sent her a note and a red rose every day.

At a certain point Mr. Bissell’s mother intervened. “I want to know your feelings toward my son,” she told Bim. “He is in love with you.”

“He is in love with India,” Bim replied.

“I know my son,” Ms. Bissell said, “and it’s time to fish or cut bait.”

They married in 1963 at Mr. Bowles’s house.

With his wife’s help and connections, Mr. Bissell founded a company, Fabindia, to sell products — home furnishings, clothing and jewelry — made by Indian artisans using traditional techniques. At first it operated out of a room in his rented apartment. Over the decades it grew into a household name in India, with a thriving export business as well as hundreds of retail stores across the country.

After Mr. Bowles’s appointment ended in 1969, Ms. Bissell served his successors, Ambassadors Kenneth B. Keating and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, whose term ended in 1975.

She then joined the World Bank as its external affairs officer in India, essentially working as a cultural ambassador for the bank and as an all-around fixer, helping the bank’s expatriate officials find housing and schools for their children, shopping with their wives, even setting up their telephone lines. She worked with scores of nongovernmental organizations — and founded one, Udyogini, with a mission to empower Indian women entrepreneurs.

In addition to her daughter, Ms. Bissell is survived by her son, William, who runs Fabindia, two grandchildren, and a sister, Meena Singh. Mr. Bissell died in 1998.

After leaving the World Bank in 1996, Ms. Bissell worked as a consultant to a number of organizations and continued to be the center of a cross-cultural social whirlwind. She sold her school, the Playhouse, in 2005. Her house remained a hub for a glittering array of politicians, artists and literary figures who, until her death, relied on her for her political acumen and were buoyed by her friendship.

Eric Garcetti, the former mayor of Los Angeles and the departing U.S. ambassador to India, was just as taken with Ms. Bissell as his predecessors had been.

“You are India,” he told her. “And India is you.”