Here's the thing: reading is consumption rather than creation. While reading can be used to improve oneself, it will never improve the world in itself. Learning how to read or improving reading proficiency may be a personal accomplishment, but reading in quantity is not an achievement for the greater good. In other words: you would accomplish pretty much the same thing if you had a TV watching competition.

A discussion like this may make sense if they were talking about writing competitions, because writing is an act of creation, but they aren't.

A program like this may have made sense if they were setting goalposts to encourage reading, rather than an outright competition, but they didn't.