[3][1][2] Ilyas Rashidi was born in Delhi, British India in 1925, he worked with his brothers, Mohammad Usman Azad and Mohammad Umar Farooqi, for the Delhi-based Urdu newspaper Anjam (owned by Umar) which shifted to Karachi after partition in 1947.
[2] The Ilyas Rashidi Lifetime Achievement Gold Medal is presented annually at the Nigar Awards ceremony and event.
In January 2017, a press conference was held at a local hotel in Karachi to announce the scheduled date of 16 March 2017 for the 47th Nigar Awards.
[1] He was also affectionately called Baba-e-Filmi Sahafat (Pioneer of Film Journalism) in Pakistan.
His son, Aslam Ilyas Rashidi temporarily suspended the annual awarding of Nigar Awards from 2005 to 2012 due to a then ongoing decline in Pakistani film industry during that period.