[3][2] In 1956, he moved to the United States of America to study at Cornell University under the mycologist Richard P. Korf, receiving his Doctorate in Botany in 1958.
[3] After completing his doctorate at Cornell University, he started teaching botany at Swarthmore College near Philadelphia where he met Suzanne W. Tubby, his future wife.
[2] After his retirement, he served as coordinator of the International Encyclopedia of Life Support Systems, a UNESCO project aimed at providing information regarding food and agriculture for developing countries.
[2] Batra married one of his students, the entomologist Suzanne W. Tubby, in a Hindu wedding ceremony on 12 June 1960 in Delhi, India, and they had two children, daughter Mira and son Persa.
[2] Once, he dressed up in a plaid shirt, jeans and a straw hat and entered the Greenbelt Labor Day parade, with 13 piglets and a sow that he had borrowed from the research station.
[2] According to his former Beltsville colleague, Marie Tousignant, he also combined his interests in linguistics and mycology and "... once translated all of the Latin scientific terms into Japanese".
[3] His funeral followed a traditional Indian reception where, in reference to his field of study, mourners were served with truffles, morels, oyster and shiitake mushrooms.