[1] During this period he worked for three years on the Palmaceae[4][5] as a senior post-doctoral fellow of the National Institute of Science of India.
[1] From 1967 until his death in 1971, he was head of the department of botany, Andhra University Postgraduate Centre, Guntur, India, where he both taught and wrote.
[20] The monograph was said by J.P.Rourke of the Compton Herbarium, himself a specialist in Proteaceae, to be a broad survey of the whole family on the basis of the anatomy and morphology of the leaves, stems, inflorescences, flowers, and fruits of representative species from most of the living genera.
Embryological features are treated in detail and accounts of the cytology and fossil records are also provided....As the leading researcher on this family, Venkata Rao has, not unnaturally, drawn heavily on his own work but has nevertheless succeeded in dealing with the literature as a whole in a comprehensive manner.
[21] A second reviewer, Ronald Melville (of Kew Gardens), disagreed with Rao's phylogenetic and evolutionary conclusions but thought that many would be grateful to Venkata Rao "for bringing together in one volume such a detailed, comparative account of the vegetative and floral morphology and anatomy, the cytology and embryology, which will make it a valuable work of reference for a long time to come.