BAHADURGARH, India — India deployed thousands of troops in a northern state on Sunday to quell protests that have severely restricted water supplies to New Delhi, forced factories to close and killed 10 people. The Delhi government ordered schools closed on Monday and rationed water supplies to make sure that hospitals and emergency services had enough.

Rioting and looting in Haryana State by the Jats, a rural caste, is symptomatic of increasingly fierce competition for government jobs and educational openings in India, whose growing population is set to overtake China’s within a decade.

The latest unrest threatens to undermine Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s promise of better days to come for Indians who elected him in 2014 with the largest majority in three decades.

As before, Mr. Modi ignored the protests — instead giving a speech on rural and urban development in the eastern state of Chhattisgarh, unveiling a statue to a late Indian guru and praising a 104-year-old woman for backing his “Clean India” campaign.