Thankfully one of the conda env was running fine all this time but all others were “glitched” (atleast what I thought) somehow.
I just tried importing torch in all the “gliched” env and both the pip and conda installations are working now. I don’t even know what fixed it because I didn’t change anything from the last failed attempt. I just checked version from python shell in command line using platform package and checked the same in jupyter notebook as per your advice. Thank you.