1,200 jobs coming to N.J. thanks to India trip, Murphy says

MUMBAI, India — Three Indian companies with a presence in New Jersey will expand their operations and add more than 1,200 jobs, Gov. Phil Murphy said Thursday amid his seven-day business mission to the country.

The announcement came after days of jam-packed meetings with business officials, executives and elected leaders. The trade mission still has two full days left.

“It really matters we’re here,” Murphy told NJ Advance Media. “It’s very much built on real relationships.”

Tata Consultancy Services, an information technology service and consulting company, will expand its roughly 4,000 workforce in Metro Park by about 700 people, Murphy’s administration said. The company is based in Mumbai.

Larsen & Toubro, another Mumbai-based company, plans to add 600 technology jobs to its roughly 400 workers in Edison.

And Birlasoft in Edison, which is part of a larger Indian conglomerate CK Birla Group headquartered out of New Delhi, will add 160 jobs, according to the administration, which said the new jobs are a direct result of work in the lead-up to Murphy’s trade mission, and his presence here.

“We told them what we have. We told them out assets, we told them our location, and we told them who we are,” said Jose Lozano, CEO of Choose New Jersey, which is funding the trip.

Murphy argues New Jersey is an attractive place for Indian business to grow because “there’s talent, location, and comfort” packaged together in the Garden State, where Indian-Americans represent the largest group of foreign-born residents in the state.

It’s one of the fastest-growing communities in the state.

There are nearly 300,000 Indians living in the state, according to the latest U.S. Census data. The Garden State trails only California (530,000) and New York (314,000) in its Indian residents.

From 2000 to 2010, there was a nearly 73 percent increase in the number of Indians who moved to New Jersey, compared to the nearly 47 percent increase in California and only 6 percent bump in New York, according to the census.

And the personal connections made during face-to-face meetings during his week-long trip here will bolster that connection to the country, Murphy said.

“I’ll be very surprised when we look back in a year-ish, I’ll give myself a year, that thousands of jobs had not come out of this, in one form or another,” Murphy said. “Some of that may have happened, in fairness. But I think at a minimum, even if it were to happen, we’ve accelerated that — and these are real jobs.”

On Monday, Murphy announced the state is opening an office here to lure businesses to the Garden State. New Jersey already has a similar jobs attraction office in Berlin.

Both are paid for by Choose New Jersey, a business-funded nonprofit formed in 2010 at former Gov. Chris Christie’s urging.

It’s made up of some of the state’s largest utilities, labor unions, and financial companies. Its stated mission is to attract businesses to the Garden State. The group’s board members — which include PSE&G, Horizon Blue Cross Blue Shield of New Jersey and PNC Bank — have deep business stakes with New Jersey that intersect with government oversight.

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