Rao was honoured by numerous colloquia, honorary degrees, and festschrifts and was awarded the US National Medal of Science in 2002.

[8] Rao was also a Senior Policy and Statistics advisor for the Indian Heart Association non-profit focused on raising South Asian cardiovascular disease awareness.

His schooling was completed in Gudur, Nuzvid, Nandigama, and Visakhapatnam, all in the present state of Andhra Pradesh.

Rao received 38 honorary doctoral degrees from universities in 19 countries around the world and numerous awards and medals for his contributions to statistics and science.

He was most recently honoured with his 38th honorary doctorate by the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, on 26 July 2014 for "his contributions to the foundations of modern statistics through the introduction of concepts such as Cramér–Rao inequality, Rao–Blackwellization, Rao distance, Rao measure, and for introducing the idea of orthogonal arrays for the industry to design high-quality products."

[15][16][17][18] Obituaries describing his professional contributions and impact on the society have been published in the IMS Bulletin [1] and Nature [2].