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Water quality index is a measure of water quality at a certain location and over a period of time. High value indicates that the water is unsafe for drinking and inadequate in quality to meet the designated uses. Most of the classical models are unreliable producing unpromising forecasting results. This study presents Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques and a Multi Linear Regression (MLR) as the classical linear model for estimating the Water Quality Index (WQI) of Palla station of Yamuna river, India. Full-scale data of the river were used in validating the models. Performance measures such as Mean Square Error (MSE), Root Mean Squared Error (RMSE) and Determination Coefficient (DC) were utilized in evaluating the accuracy and performance of the models. The obtained result depicted the superiority of AI models over the MLR model. The results also indicated that, the best model of both ANN and ANFIS proved high improvement in performance accuracy over MLR up to 10% in the verification phase. The difference between ANN and ANFIS accuracy is negligible due to a slight increment in performance accuracy indicating that both ANN and ANFIS could serve as reliable models for the estimation of WQI.