[4][5] Venkayya joined the British Indian Army at age 19 and served in South Africa during the Second Boer War (1899–1902).

He studied at the Hindu High School in Machilipatnam, but also spent his childhood in various places in the Krishna district like Yarlagadda and Pedakallepalli.

[11] At the age of 19, he enrolled in the British Indian Army and was deployed to South Africa during the Second Boer War (1899–1902), where he met Gandhi for the first time.

[2] Venkayya worked on potential designs that could be used as flags for the newly coined Swaraj movement to signify independence.

On Gandhi's suggestion, Venkayya added a white stripe to represent all the other denominations and religions present in the country.

While the flag was not officially adopted by the AICC, which reordered the stripes and changed the red to orange in 1931, it came to be used across the country.

The flag was adopted in its present form during a meeting of the Constituent Assembly on 22 July 1947, twenty days before India's Independence.

In 1995, then Chief Minister of Andhra Pradesh N. T. Rama Rao commissioned a statue of Venkayya – one among the 31 state icons – at Tank Bund Road in Hyderabad.

[19] In January 2015, a statue of him was unveiled by the then Urban Development Minister Venkaiah Naidu, in the forelawns of the All India Radio building in Vijayawada.