R. Mitra was born in 1945 in Allahabad(UP, India). He had his early education up to B.Sc.from Lucknow. Subsequently he obtained M.Sc. (Tech.) from the University of Allahabad and M.Tech. from IIT Kharagpur. He did his Ph.D. in the area of Control Systems in 1976 from University of Roorkee.

Besides post doctoral work at DFVLR laboratory in West Germany, he had been in the faculty of Department of Systems and Control, University of Technology, Baghdad and Thapar Engineering College, Patiala. For the past 40 years Dr. Mitra is with the Department of Electronics and Computer Engineering, Indian Institute of Technology, Roorkee (Formerly University of Roorkee), teaching various courses in the area of control systems, electronic instrumentation and microprocessor application. His area of research includes System Theory, Control Systems; Microprocessor based Instrumentation & Control, Robotics.